exaggerating

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of exaggerate.

   He kept exaggerating the dangers of the trip to frighten his friends.

   The reporters were accused of exaggerating the scale of the protest.

   Note

   Two jobs share this spelling: the progressive (they are exaggerating the risk) and the gerund (exaggerating the risk helps nobody). Both can take a direct object, and an object is the surest sign that the verb is at work rather than the adjective. Exaggerating the dangers reports an act, while an exaggerating manner describes one. The verb also stands alone, as in you're exaggerating.

2. 2
   adjective

   Inclined to overstate things, or having the effect of making something seem greater than it really is; overblown.

   Like a funhouse mirror that stretches everything out of proportion.

   His exaggerating gestures filled the whole stage during the comic monologue.

   She has an exaggerating habit that makes her fishing stories hard to believe.

   Similaroverblown, theatrical, extravagant, hyperbolic

   Oppositeunderstated, restrained

   Note

   The adjective that takes degree: very exaggerating, more exaggerating, most exaggerating. That is the quick way to tell it from the verb form, which does not take very. In "very exaggerating in their phraseology" the word describes a habit, not an action under way. It fits people and manners alike, from "the most exaggerating manner" in Gabriel Surenne's A practical Grammar of French Rhetoric (1846) to Alison Bellringer's The Bronson Escapades (2023).

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