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downside

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈdaʊnˌsaɪd//

A disadvantageous aspect of something that is normally advantageous.

noun

  1. 1

    A disadvantageous aspect of something that is normally advantageous.

    The downside of obtaining a higher rank is that far more work is expected.

    Hazardous and nuclear waste came to represent the downside of industrial prosperity.

    The downside of being snaggle-toothed is that you whistle through them and people can't understand what you're talking about.

    The downside of using acid gas for enhanced oil recovery is that the incremental produced oil contains H₂S and has to be desulphurized.

  2. 2

    A downward tendency, especially in the price of shares etc.

    The strategy is used both to increase the return on the underlying stock and to provide a limited amount of downside protection.

    I could go all the way back to 1982 and I'm sure the effects of the expiration will be even more exacerbated on the downside of the spread.

    In Table 3, the options are shown for the same client who will accept a one in ten chance of breaching the downside of -3% in any one year.

    Alienation: A stage on the downside of the passage wherein the holdfast and the antihero take actions which bring about a disintegration of personality.

  3. 3

    The side of something that is at the bottom, or that is intended to face downward.

    An apparatus for heat-treating a flowing fluid, comprising a fluid source; a heat exchange unit provided with a regenerative section, the latter having an upside through which such fluid is caused to flow and a downside through which such fluid is caused to flow subsequent to being heated, said upside and downside being separated from one another by a heat-conductive wall, […]

    The buildings on the downside of the station were demolished and new premises of modern design constructed on the new platform.

    Notice in Figure 19.2 that polarities naturally and predictably "flow" (arrows represent a plot of changes in results) from the downside of pole L toward the upside of pole R; the into the downside of pole R; then toward the upside of the first, pole L; and finally back to the downside of L, where it all began.

    Moreover, the flow chugging was observed at the downside of the plate.

Etymology

Compound of down + side.

Forms

plural
downsides
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).