Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

depressing

UK/dɪˈpɹɛsɪŋ(ɡ)/US/dɪˈpɹɛsɪŋ/
adjectiveB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,226 of 15,258leans spoken

Depressing means making people feel low in spirits. Depressing news, a depressing sight, deeply depressing.

It describes the thing rather than the person, so a film is depressing and a person is depressed. It is not a clinical word: depression as an illness is not caused by depressing news, and the shared root confuses the two more than it should.

Definitions of depressing

  1. 1adjectivedepressingMaking people feel low in spirits.B2

    “It's so depressing when it rains every day of your holiday.”

depressing is a quality.

Practise this word

depressing in the wild

  • Terms for the "pushing" of a button include pressing, depressing, mashing, slapping, hitting, and punching.

    Push-button

  • In this book, Reynolds analyses 52 songs and ranks them in order of what he thinks is the most depressing.

    I Hate Myself and Want to Die (book)

  • By the 1980s, the Manchester City Council Planning Department rejected Brutalist proposals in the city believing such buildings to be cold and depressing pieces of architecture.

    Lincoln House, Manchester

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.