Other forms: undermines, undermined, undermining
To undermine something is to weaken it quietly from underneath, so that it looks solid right up to the moment it gives way. The colleague who agrees with you in the meeting and disagrees with you in the corridor is undermining you.
What gets undermined is nearly always something that stands on other people believing in it — confidence, authority, trust, a government, an argument, someone's position. That is what separates it from attack: an attack happens in the open where you can answer it, and undermining happens where you cannot. The literal sense is still alive in engineering and geology, where a river undermines its bank by carrying off the earth below until the bank drops into the water. The noun is undermining — the constant undermining of her authority — and the verb always takes an object, so somebody or something is being undermined.
1verbundermineTo weaken something gradually and from beneath, without open attack.~88%
“The leaks undermined public trust in the inquiry.”
2verblogicTo take away what an argument or a claim rests on, so that it no longer stands.~9%
“One document undermined the whole case.”
3verbwearTo wear away the ground under something until it gives way.~3%
“The sea has undermined the cliff path.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 132 sentences found in the wild and placed 132 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: sabotage
under-MINE → a MINE
Soldiers dig a mine under the castle wall — a long dark tunnel with wooden posts holding the roof up. They set the posts on fire and walk out. Above them the wall still stands. Then it sits down into the ground.
hooks ontomine
Middle English
min
English
mine
English, today
undermine
From under- + mine. mine comes from Middle English min. From Middle English min, myn, from Old English mīn, from Proto-West Germanic mīn, from Proto-Germanic mīnaz, from Proto-Indo-European méynos. Cognate with stq mien, West Frisian myn, Dutch mijn, Low German mien, German mein, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish min, Faroese and Icelandic mín.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA