Skip to content
OneKitly

despise

verbcommon in dialogue

  • //dɪˈspaɪz//

To regard with contempt or scorn.

verb

  1. 1

    To regard with contempt or scorn.

    Near-synonym: hate

    Katie despised video games because she saw them as a trashy, boring waste of time.

    James still despises his brother for the time he pushed him out of a tree during their childhood.

  2. 2

    To disregard or ignore.

Etymology

From Middle English despisen, from Old French despis-, stem of despire, from Latin dēspicere (“to look down upon, despise, scorn”), from dē (“down”) + speciō (“to look at”). Displaced native Old English forsēon.

Forms

past tense
despised
past participle
despised
present participle
despising
third person singular
despises
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).