# undermine

Pronunciation: US say "un-dur-MYN" /ˌʌn.dɚˈmaɪn/; UK say "un-duh-MYN" /ˌʌn.dəˈmaɪn/

## Verb

1. To weaken or work against something; to hinder or sabotage it, often by indirect or gradual means.
   - Simple: To slowly make something weaker, often in a quiet or hidden way.
   - _Leaking the figures early was clearly meant to undermine the negotiations._
   - _Repeated delays began to undermine public trust in the agency._
2. To weaken something from below by gradually removing the ground or foundation that supports it, as flowing water may do.
   - Simple: To slowly wear away the ground or base under something, often by water.
   - _The swollen river began to undermine the supports of the old stone bridge._
   - _Decades of tidal scour had undermined the seawall along the harbor._
3. To dig underneath something, such as a wall or fortress, in order to weaken or destroy it; to sap.
   - Simple: To dig a tunnel under something, such as a wall, to make it fall down or to attack.
   - _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._
4. To regard an object as merely the sum of the parts that compose it, reducing the whole to its smaller components.
   - Simple: To treat a thing as nothing more than the smaller parts it is made of.
   - _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._

## Origin

Formed from the prefix under- combined with mine.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/undermine (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).