mitigate

verb
/ˈmɪt.ɪ.ɡeɪt/

Etymology

From Middle English mitigaten (“to relieve pain, soothe; (swelling) to abate; (hemorrhoids) to relieve; (the mind) to placate, appease; to end, check; to stop, cease”), from mitigat(e) (“mitigated, alleviated, relived”, also used as the past participle of mitigaten) + -en (verb-forming suffix), borrowed from Latin mītigātus, the perfect passive participle of mītigō (“to make soft, ripe; to tame, pacify”), from mītis (“gentle, mild, ripe”) + -igō (“to do, make”), of uncertain origin, but perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *meh₁y- (“mild, soft”).

  1. derived from mītigātus
  2. inherited from mitigaten

Definitions

  1. To reduce, lessen, or decrease and thereby to make less severe or easier to bear.

    • Measures are pursuing to prevent or mitigate the usual consequences of such outrages, and with the hope of their succeeding at least to avert general hostility.
    • But in yielding to it the retaliation has been mitigated as much as possible, both in its extent and in its character...
    • Then they tell us that vaccination will mitigate the disease that it will make it milder.
  2. To downplay.

  3. To give force or effect toward preventing a problem.

    • We've mitigated against the chance of flooding.
  4. + 1 more definition
    1. Mitigated, alleviated.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at mitigate. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01mitigate02preventing03prevent04precede05rank06unmitigated07mitigated

A definitional loop anchored at mitigate. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

7 hops · closes at mitigate

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA