extenuate.
Of a person: emaciated, wasted, weakened; of the body or part of it: atrophied, shrunken, withered.
Meaning & usage
Of a person: emaciated, wasted, weakened; of the body or part of it: atrophied, shrunken, withered.
Of a quality or thing: lessened, weakened.
Reduced to poverty; impoverished.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English extenuat (“(medicine) made thin, emaciated”), from Latin extenuātus (“diminished, reduced, thinned”), perfect passive participle of extenuō (“to diminish, reduce, thin”) (see -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from ex- (“out-, thoroughly”) + tenuō (“to enfeeble, weaken, wear down; to lessen, reduce; to make thin”), from tenuis (“fine, slender, thin; feeble, weak”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *tenh₂- (“to extend, stretch; thin”)) + -ō (first conjugation-verb forming suffix). Compare attenuate.
To make (something) less dense, or thinner; also, to lower the viscosity of (something).
To make (someone or something) slender or thin; to emaciate, to waste.
To underestimate or understate the importance of (something); to underrate.
To underestimate or understate the importance of (something); to underrate. To diminish or seek to diminish the extent or severity of (a crime, guilt, a mistake, or something else negative) by making apologies or excuses; to palliate.
to extenuate his faults to extenuate their crimes
To beat or draw (a metal object, etc.) out so as to lessen the thickness.
To reduce the quality or quantity of (something); to lessen or weaken the force of (something).
To degrade (someone); to detract from (someone's qualities, reputation, etc.); to depreciate, to disparage.
Where this word comes from
From Latin extenuātus (“diminished, reduced, thinned”) (more at etymology 1), see -ate (verb-forming suffix).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.