embarrassing

1. 1
   adjective

   Causing a feeling of uncomfortable shame or self-consciousness.

   His embarrassing slip of the tongue silenced the whole room.

   Forgetting her boss's name in front of the clients was deeply embarrassing.

   Similarhumiliating, mortifying, awkward, shameful, uncomfortable

   Note

   A fully gradable adjective: it takes more and most, and it welcomes intensifiers such as deeply or outright. It describes slips, situations and stories. In Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963) it sits between mean and sad, shading from awkwardness toward pity. It can also turn outward as a verdict on someone else's claim ("This is outright embarrassing"), implying that the claim's author should feel the shame.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of embarrass.

   The candidate kept embarrassing himself with off-the-cuff remarks.

   Constantly embarrassing the team, he was eventually dropped from the roster.

   Note

   Behind the -ing lies a verb with a wider reach than shame. Embarrass can also mean to impede movement, to burden with debt, or, in formal use, to perplex. As a participle it takes an object, as in embarrassing himself or embarrassing the team. Once it stands alone and accepts very or more, it has become the adjective of discomfort.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The action of making someone feel embarrassed; embarrassment.

   The deliberate embarrassing of opponents had become his signature tactic in debates.

   He took a quiet, cruel pleasure in the embarrassing of his rivals.

   Similarhumiliation, shaming

   Note

   A verbal noun that usually takes no plural and is typically followed by of, as in the embarrassing of his rivals. The plural survives in older prose. Robert Wodrow, writing in 1715, speaks of "the present embarrassings of affairs," meaning entanglements and difficulties rather than blushes. Where modern English wants the feeling, it reaches for embarrassment. The -ing noun names the act itself.

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