PEJORATIVE

Pejorative

A pejorative is a word or grammatical form of expression that expresses contempt, criticism, hostility, disregard and/or disrespect. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social or cultural groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts. Sometimes, a term may begin as a pejorative and eventually be adopted in a non-pejorative sense in some or all contexts, e.g., "punk" or "dude". In historical linguistics, this phenomenon is known as melioration, or amelioration, reclaiming, or semantic change.

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pejorative

Noun

  1. A disparaging, belittling, or derogatory word or expression.

Adjective

  1. Disparaging, belittling or derogatory.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: pejorative
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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