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ameliorate

UK/əˈmiːli.əɹeɪt/US/əˈmiːli.əɹeɪt/
verbC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,622 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: ameliorated, ameliorating, ameliorates

To ameliorate is to make a bad situation better. Ameliorate the damage, ameliorate conditions, do something to ameliorate it.

It is a formal word and takes the trouble as its object, so you ameliorate the suffering rather than the sufferer. It softens rather than cures, which is why official reports reach for it when nothing has actually been fixed.

Definitions of ameliorate

  1. 1verbameliorateTo make a bad situation better.C2

    “The grant did something to ameliorate the worst of the hardship.”

ameliorate is an improving.

Where it comes from

An alteration of meliorate, reshaped after French ameliorer, from Latin melior, better.

  1. French

    améliorer

  2. English, today

    ameliorate

Alteration of meliorate after French améliorer.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

ameliorate in the wild

  • Calcium replacement or vitamin D can ameliorate the symptoms but can increase the risk of kidney stones and chronic kidney disease.

    Hypoparathyroidism

  • To ameliorate the loss, some machines implement branch target prediction: given the address of a branch, they predict the target of that branch.

    Branch target predictor

  • The dam played an important role in helping to ameliorate the impact of the 1998 Yangtze Floods.

    Geheyan Dam

  • Spending the time in opposition he spoke in the Commons in favour of measures to ameliorate poverty.

    Gavin Brown Clark

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.