undermine
Formsundermines, undermining, undermined
- 1To weaken or work against something; to hinder or sabotage it, often by indirect or gradual means.
Leaking the figures early was clearly meant to undermine the negotiations.
Repeated delays began to undermine public trust in the agency.
Oppositestrengthen, support, bolster, reinforce
Note
The figurative sense grew out of the siege-digging meaning: an attack that works from below rather than head-on. That is why it suits slow, indirect damage. Bickering undermines a war effort, and a scandal undermines credibility. It also takes a reflexive turn, as when a book undermines its own discoveries. Undercut is a close synonym. Corrode puts more weight on gradual wearing away.
- 2To weaken something from below by gradually removing the ground or foundation that supports it, as flowing water may do.
The swollen river began to undermine the supports of the old stone bridge.
Decades of tidal scour had undermined the seawall along the harbor.
Similarerode, scour, weaken, sap
Oppositereinforce, strengthen
Note
Nature does the digging here, most often water. Nobody sets out to do it, unlike the deliberate military digging. A canal breach after torrential rain can undermine a railway line, and a swollen river can undermine the footings of a bridge. It is the literal picture behind the figurative sense: something weakened from beneath until it gives way.
- 3To dig underneath something, such as a wall or fortress, in order to weaken or destroy it; to sap.
The besieging army began to undermine the fortress walls during the long siege.
Engineers undermined the gatehouse, then burned the timber props until the structure fell.
Oppositereinforce, strengthen
Note
Here the word means exactly what its parts say: under- plus mine, to dig a mine beneath something. It belongs to siege warfare, where a passage cut under a wall was meant to bring the wall down, and sap is its close synonym. The target need not be a fortification: Diarmaid MacCulloch's A History of Christianity has Martin undermining a tree sacred to old gods until it falls.
- 4To regard an object as merely the sum of the parts that compose it, reducing the whole to its smaller components.
Reductionist accounts undermine the object, dissolving it into the particles that constitute it.
Harman warns against philosophies that undermine things by reducing them to their smaller components.
Similarreduce
Note
A term of art in object-oriented ontology, and it comes with a twin: overmine is its counterpart, and this sense reduces an object downward to its parts. Harman calls doing both at once duomining. Nicholas Gayle's Conrad and the Being of the World (2022) argues that everyday thought runs the two in tandem. The term has nothing to do with sabotage.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from the prefix under- combined with mine.