Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To minimize the significance of; play down.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive To
de-emphasize ; to present or portray as lessimportant orconsequential .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb understate the importance or quality of
- verb represent as less significant or important
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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What Glenn and other critics seem to downplay is that media coverage tends to be negative about everything.
Archive 2003-09-01 David 2003
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What Glenn and other critics seem to downplay is that media coverage tends to be negative about everything.
Billings Blog David 2003
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Did he "downplay" the significance of Florida and Ohio or play up the significance of other states - VA, NV, CO, MO, NC ... etc
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It's a no-win situation, if you ignore the character's race it means that you are trying to "downplay" it, so audiences wont notice.
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Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton last night criticized the Bush administration for its response to Iran's nuclear program, saying it had chosen to "downplay" the crisis over the past several years.
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Early on they began the kind of downplay of this whole she needs to have a hefty double-digit number, a hefty double-digit win, saying look, Barack Obama has spent a lot of money in this state.
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And really, in a move, a strategy by the White House to kind of downplay his significance, really portray him as a bit player, one line for Iran saying that it was really part of a brutal regime that put down its own citizens.
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Sharma says companies may be trying to "downplay" the problem, but "it is certainly a big issue."
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Clinton administration approach to that has been to kind of downplay the threat of that technology.
Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security 1999
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We made a deliberate decision to kind of downplay the Inaugural and not to try to tie too much of that to fundraising, so we're going to have work harder this year.
President Remarks In Mammogram Announcement ITY National Archives 1997
oroboros commented on the word downplay
According to Daniel Shore this word and others like it arose in response to the need to cut costs during journalism's "cablese" (his word) days, where words cost 5-cents apiece ("Real money in those days."). Thus, 'play down' became 'downplay' and a nickel was saved. With the advent of teletype machines the cost was determined by the letter, not the word, but the neologisms were here to stay at that point.
May 19, 2008