invidious

UK/ɪnˈvɪdi.əs/US/ɪnˈvɪdi.əs/

adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Invidious means likely to cause resentment however you handle it. An invidious comparison.

It describes a task rather than a person, and the resentment is unavoidable rather than deserved. Choosing between two colleagues for one promotion is the classic invidious position.

Definitions of invidious

1adjectiveinvidiousLikely to cause resentment however you handle it.C2
“He was put in the invidious position of ranking his own friends.”

invidious is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin invidiosus, from invidia, envy, which is in plus videre, to look upon, so literally looking at with ill will.

Proto-Indo-European
*weyd-
Latin
invidiōsus
English, today
invidious

Built from

invidia · Latin — envy, ill will
in- · Latin — upon
videō · Latin — to see

Borrowed from Latin invidiōsus, from invidia (“envy, ill will”), from in- (“upon”) + videō (“to see”); the meaning developed from “look back at” to “look askance at” to “envy.” a doublet of envious, from Old French.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

invidious in the wild

Chief Justice Burger's decision to allow "benign" (as opposed to "invidious") racial classifications under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment was controversial.
Fullilove v. Klutznick
Despite high ratings, the programme was not a critical success, with many commentators focusing on Celi's accented English and making invidious comparisons with ITV's high-profile competitor Brideshead Revisited.
The Borgias (1981 TV series)

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.

Related words

the videō family

visit video vision

invidious — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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