exaggerate

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin exaggerātus, the past participle of exaggerō (“to heap up; to heighten, amplify, magnify”),^[2][3][4][5] formed from the intensive prefix ex- and aggerō (“to heap up”),^[2][6][7][8] from agger (“heap, mound”).^{[2][3][9][10]} The noun agger is itself from a verb meaning to bring together or carry toward, formed from ad- (“to, toward”) and gerō (“to carry”),^[3][4][5][6] although Hoad calls this derivation only probable.^[9] The OED compares French exagérer, spelled exaggerer in the 16th century.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

To heap or pile up, to accumulate, of both material and immaterial things: 1533, in Thomas More's Apology.^[2][4] Etymonline likewise dates the word to the 1530s in the sense "to pile up, accumulate",^[3] and Dictionary.com dates it 1525–35.^[11]

Semantic evolution

The literal Latin sense came first: Ayto quotes Philip Stubbes (1583) on people who with their flapping in the dirt "exaggerate a mountain of mire".^[8] From 1564 the word was used figuratively for piling up praise or blame and for dwelling on the greatness of virtues or faults,^[2][4][3] the step that the Oxford Dictionary of English sees as giving rise to the current senses.^[12] The sense "to magnify beyond the truth, overstate" is first recorded in Cawdrey's dictionary of 1604,^[2] and Ayto notes that it came to the fore only in the 17th century, although the Latin word already had it.^[8] Barnhart and Etymonline date the sense of magnifying or overstating to 1564, counting the earlier emphatic use.^[4][3] The literal sense died out after 1676 and the emphatic one after 1742.^[2] Johnson (1755) defined the verb as to heighten by representation, quoting Addison's "A friend exaggerates a man's virtues, an enemy inflames his crimes".^[13] From 1850, in Leigh Hunt, it was also used of making a condition worse or a physical feature abnormally large.^[2][7]

Timeline

• 1533 – to heap up, accumulate, in Thomas More (now obsolete).^[2][4]
• 1564 – to pile up praise or blame; to emphasize, dwell on (now obsolete).^[2][4]
• 1604 – to magnify beyond the truth, to overstate.^[2]
• 1850 – to intensify a condition abnormally; to make a feature abnormally large.^[2][7]

Meanings

Verb

1. To describe or present something as bigger, better, worse or more important than it really is; to overstate: He always exaggerates the size of the fish he has caught.^[14][5][2]
2. To make statements that go beyond the truth: I'm not exaggerating when I say the climb took all day.^[14][7]
3. To make something larger or more noticeable than is normal: The tight collar exaggerated his long neck.^[14][2]
4. (obsolete, 1533–1676) To heap up or accumulate.^[2][5][7]
5. (obsolete, 1564–1742) To emphasize or dwell on the greatness of a virtue, fault or the like.^[2][7]

Word family

• exaggeratedly
• exaggeration
• exaggerator
• exaggeratedness
• exaggerative
• exaggeratory
• exaggeratingly

Related words

• gesture
• jest
• congest
• digest
• suggest
• register

Usage notes

Mark Twain is usually credited with saying that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated; according to Cresswell, what he actually wrote, in the New York Journal of 2 June 1897, was that the report of his death was an exaggeration.^[15]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
7. ^ a b c d e f Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
9. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
11. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
12. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
13. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
15. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press