Meaning & use
placate
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Meaning
verbtransitive
To calm someone who is angry or upset, often by giving them something they want or by agreeing to part of their demand.
Grammar: Takes an object: placate the customers. The effect may be temporary.
Patterns
- placate someone
- placate someone with something
The manager offered a refund to placate the angry customer.
She tried to placate her brother by apologizing, but he stayed upset.
The government made small changes to placate the protesters.
Word forms
| third person singular | placates |
|---|---|
| past tense | placated |
| -ing form | placating |
Common combinations
- placate critics
- The company issued a statement to placate critics.
- placate an angry customer
- A free coffee failed to placate the angry customer.
- try to placate
- He tried to placate his boss by working late.
- placating tone
- She spoke in a placating tone, hoping to avoid a fight.
- placate someone with promises
- Officials tried to placate residents with promises of new buses.
Synonyms and how they differ
- appease
- Appease suggests giving in to demands to avoid trouble and often sounds weak or disapproving, whereas placate is milder.
- pacify
- Pacify focuses on making someone calm or quiet, while placate stresses winning them over with a concession.
- soothe
- Soothe is gentle and comforting for pain or worry, while placate deals with anger and usually involves a bargain.
- mollify
- Mollify is a more formal word for softening someone's temper, often with kind words rather than concessions.
Opposites
Word family
- placation noun
- the act of calming someone's anger
- placatory adjective
- intended to calm someone's anger
- placable adjective
- easily calmed, a formal and rare word
- implacable adjective
- impossible to calm or satisfy
Commonly confused: placate or placebo?
placate vs placebo
A placebo is a harmless treatment given as a test or to comfort a patient. Placate is a verb about calming an angry person.
Practice
The airline gave passengers free vouchers to ______ them after the long delay.
Choose one answer.
Placate means to calm angry people, which is what vouchers after a delay aim to do. The other verbs look similar but mean blame, copy, and teach.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “placate”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.