Aggravate vs Mitigate - What's the difference?
aggravate | mitigate | Antonyms |
To make worse, or more severe; to render less tolerable or less excusable; to make more offensive; to enhance; to intensify.
To give coloring to in description; to exaggerate; as, to aggravate circumstances. — .
To exasperate; to provoke, to irritate.
* 1748 , (Samuel Richardson), Clarissa :
* {{quote-book, year=1905, author=
, title=
, chapter=1 * 1977 , (Alistair Horne), A Savage War of Peace , New York Review Books 2006, p. 85:
To reduce, lessen, or decrease.
* 1795 —
* 1813 —
* 1896 —
* 1901 — , ch 7
* 1920 —
To downplay.
Mitigate is a antonym of aggravate.
As verbs the difference between aggravate and mitigate
is that aggravate is to make worse, or more severe; to render less tolerable or less excusable; to make more offensive; to enhance; to intensify while mitigate is to reduce, lessen, or decrease.aggravate
English
Verb
(aggravat)- To aggravate my woes. —
- To aggravate the horrors of the scene. —.
- The defense made by the prisoner's counsel did rather aggravate than extenuate his crime. —Addison.
- If both were to aggravate her parents, as my brother and sister do mine.
citation, passage=“It is a pity,” he retorted with aggravating meekness, “that they do not use a little common sense. The case resembles that of Columbus' egg, and is every bit as simple. […]”}}
- Ben Bella was aggravated by having to express himself in French because the Egyptians were unable to understand his Arabic.
Usage notes
* Although the meaning "to exasperate, to annoy" has been in continuous usage since the 16th century, a large number of usage mavens have contested it since the 1870s. Opinions have swayed from this proscription since 1965, but it still garners disapproval in Garner's Modern American Usage (2009), at least for formal writing.Synonyms
* heighten, intensify, increase, magnify, exaggerate, provoke, irritate, exasperate * See alsoExternal links
* * ----mitigate
English
Verb
(mitigat)- Measures are pursuing to prevent or mitigate the usual consequences of such outrages, and with the hope of their succeeding at least to avert general hostility.
- But in yielding to it the retaliation has been mitigated as much as possible, both in its extent and in its character...
- Then they tell us that vaccination will mitigate the disease that it will make it milder.
- Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated by blue spectacles.
- The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten.