denounce

The everyday sense usually works in a pattern: you denounce someone as a swindler, or a scheme as the end of affordable travel. The as-phrase carries the charge itself. Unlike plain criticism, denouncing is an open, public stand, like Mr. Cameron's outside 10 Downing Street. When the listener is an authority rather than the public, the verb has shifted to informing against someone.

Here the accusation goes to someone with the power to act: you denounce a confederate in crime, or denounce someone to the authorities. The to-phrase is the clearest signal of this sense. Without it, readers tend to hear public condemnation instead. It is the informer's verb, often used of turning on one's own associates.

Here the Latin core, dēnūntiō, "to announce", survives intact, so this sense sits closer to the "proclaim" meaning than to the "condemn" meaning. Denouncing a treaty is a legal act of withdrawal, not a verdict on it, and it can be partial: a state may denounce a whole convention or only one part. Matthew Scott, writing in the i in 2020, still felt the need to gloss the word as "leave".

A term from past American mining practice rather than current use. The object is the mine, and the act is a claim on a working someone else has neglected. A mine left abandoned, or worked too little, could be denounced by a new party seeking the right to operate it. Nothing condemnatory survives in this sense; it is a straightforward legal assertion of a right.