proportionate

UK/pɹəˈpɔːʃənət/US/pɹəˈpɔɹʃənət/

adjectiveB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Proportionate means one thing matches another in size, fairly and sensibly. A proportionate fine for parking badly is twenty pounds, not two thousand.

You meet proportionate wherever fairness is being argued about — courts, workplaces, governments. A proportionate response to an insult is a sharp word back, not a lawsuit. Its opposite, disproportionate, is the commoner half of the pair, and you will hear it whenever somebody thinks a punishment has gone too far. In maths the neighbouring word is proportional, which describes two quantities that rise and fall together.

Definitions of proportionate

1adjectiveproportionateMatching another thing in size, degree or seriousness.B2
“The council promised a proportionate cut in every department.”
synonyms: commensurate, measured

Where it comes from

Latin
prōportiōnātus
English, today
proportionate

Borrowed from Latin prōportiōnātus., see -ate and -ate. by surface analysis, en + proportion + ate.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 25 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

proportionate in the wild

In cases of proportionate dwarfism, both the limbs and torso are unusually small.
Dwarfism
Historically, the term midget was used to describe dwarfs (primarily proportionate); however, some now consider this term offensive.
Dwarfism
Fitness proportionate selection, also known as roulette wheel selection or spinning wheel selection, is a selection technique used in evolutionary algorithms for selecting potentially useful solutions for recombination.
Fitness proportionate selection
When the liquid product is mixed with a proportionate amount of water, evaporated milk becomes the rough equivalent of fresh milk.
Evaporated milk
Severe stress leads to a proportionate depletion in the animal's glycogen.
Darkcutter

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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.

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