Disprizing

Part of speech: verb, adjective

Definitions

1. Regarding something as having little worth and treating it with scorn or contempt
2. Holding a person or thing in low esteem and belittling its value or importance
3. Undervaluing or slighting something by viewing it as unworthy of respect

Etymology: "Disprizing" is the present participle of "disprize," a verb formed in English by attaching the prefix "dis-" to "prize." The prefix carries a sense of reversal or negation, so to disprize something is to set a low value on it, to undervalue or depreciate it. In that sense "prize" is being turned against itself: the word that means to esteem something highly gets reversed into its opposite. The verb is a doublet of "dispraise," meaning the two words descend from the same source and developed separately in English. Both come from the same root idea of valuing, and both took the "dis-" prefix, yet "dispraise" settled on the sense of censuring or blaming, while "disprize" kept the narrower sense of holding something in low regard. The pair shows how one root can split into two words with overlapping but distinct meanings.