Did you know?
"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Parents have given that good advice for years, but unfortunately many people haven't heeded it. The word pejorative makes it clear that both English and Latin speakers have long known that disparaging words can make a bad situation worse. Pejorative derives from the Late Latin adjective pējōrātus, which in turn comes from the Latin verb pējōrāre, meaning "to make or become worse." Although pejorative words have probably always been part of English, the adjective pejorative has only been found in English texts since the late 1880s. Before then, English speakers could rely on older synonyms of pejorative such as derogatory and uncomplimentary to describe disparaging words.
Examples of pejorative in a Sentence
Matt Ridley, Genome, 1999
The word barbarian was used by the Greeks, to designate an alien, and therefore, by definition, someone inferior in culture to a Hellene. The Romans applied this in the pejorative sense to the people who came to live along the Rhine-Danube frontier.
—Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 1993
On occasion they expressed a preference for the terms Latino or Hispanic if that would assist them in escaping from the term Puerto Rican, which became, at times, almost pejorative.
—John Hope Franklin, "The Land of Room Enough," 1981,
in Race and History, 1989
a word with pejorative connotations
the reviewer used the pejorative word “versifier” to refer to the writer, whose poems had struck a responsive chord with the general public
Carly Tagen-Dye, People.com, 4 Feb. 2025
How did this figure of speech become a pejorative for elitist artistic and/or intellectual seclusion—something to be gotten out of or pulled down for the good of the cause, the community, or, more recently, the all-encompassing market?
—Matthew Wills, JSTOR Daily, 4 Jan. 2025
Louis Peitzman, Vulture, 26 Dec. 2024
In conservative circles, the pejorative label stuck.
—Meg James, Los Angeles Times, 23 Dec. 2024
See All Example Sentences for pejorative
Cite this Entry
“Pejorative.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pejorative. Accessed 5 May. 2025.
Copy Citation
Share