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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
demean
verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Students should not demean the graduation ceremony with inappropriate behavior.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ The country was noisy with fools who demeaned his anger.
▪ The psychological effects of being told what to eat can also be demeaning.
▪ There is nothing demeaning about cleaning in the food industry.
▪ They are onerous and omnipresent, useless and demeaning.
▪ They are reclaiming a heritage, their own heritage, which has been historically demeaned through cartoon characters and national stereotypes.
▪ They think that gearing a campaign towards maximum effective coverage is demeaning.
▪ This whole extravaganza is demeaning, debasing and deeply damaging to what should be serious political discourse, the protesters complain.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Demean

Demean \De*mean"\, n. [OF. demene. See Demean, v. t.]

  1. Management; treatment. [Obs.]

    Vile demean and usage bad.
    --Spenser.

  2. Behavior; conduct; bearing; demeanor. [Obs.]

    With grave demean and solemn vanity.
    --West.

Demean

Demean \De*mean"\, n. [See Demesne.]

  1. Demesne. [Obs.]

  2. pl. Resources; means. [Obs.]

    You know How narrow our demeans are.
    --Massinger.

Demean

Demean \De*mean"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Demeaned; p. pr. & vb. n. Demeaning.] [OF. demener to conduct, guide, manage, F. se d['e]mener to struggle; pref. d['e]- (L. de) + mener to lead, drive, carry on, conduct, fr. L. minare to drive animals by threatening cries, fr. minari to threaten. See Menace.]

  1. To manage; to conduct; to treat.

    [Our] clergy have with violence demeaned the matter.
    --Milton.

  2. To conduct; to behave; to comport; -- followed by the reflexive pronoun.

    They have demeaned themselves Like men born to renown by life or death.
    --Shak.

    They answered . . . that they should demean themselves according to their instructions.
    --Clarendon.

  3. To debase; to lower; to degrade; -- followed by the reflexive pronoun.

    Her son would demean himself by a marriage with an artist's daughter.
    --Thackeray.

    Note: This sense is probably due to a false etymology which regarded the word as connected with the adjective mean.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
demean

"lower in dignity," c.1600, perhaps from de- "down" + mean (adj.) and modeled on debase. Indistinguishable in some uses from obsolete demean (see demeanor) which influenced it and may be its true source. Related: Demeaned; demeaning.

Wiktionary
demean

Etymology 1 vb. 1 To debase; to lower; to degrade. 2 To humble, humble oneself; to humiliate. 3 To mortify. Etymology 2

n. 1 (context archaic English) Management; treatment. 2 (context archaic English) Behavior; conduct; bearing; demeanor. vb. 1 To manage; to conduct; to treat. 2 To conduct; to behave; to comport; followed by the reflexive pronoun. Etymology 3

n. 1 demesne. 2 resources; means.

WordNet
demean

v. reduce in worth or character, usually verbally; "She tends to put down younger women colleagues"; "His critics took him down after the lecture" [syn: take down, degrade, disgrace, put down]

Usage examples of "demean".

If you object to my terminology as exalting too much the common man, as putting sacred things to profane use, as demeaning prophecy and nobility and poesy, I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing definitions of convention that only the makers of verses, and not all of those, are poets, that only men of certain birth or ancestry or favor are dukes, and that prophets have entirely disappeared.

Carcassone, named Loba, or the Wolfess, the excess of his passion drove him over the country, howling like a wolf, and demeaning himself more like an irrational beast than a rational man.

Smoothly groomed, her sable hair imperiously pinned since her demeaning affray by the wall, Lirenda advanced in a swish of damp silk.

Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England.

Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her Ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England.

Routh of the indomitable will, Routh the planning animal: the danger came when these were thrust aside by the long review of Routh the victim of circumstances, Routh doomed by Daddy, Routh spitefully beaten, Routh unjustly sacked, Routh demeaned and degraded in seedy travelling companies and troops of pierrots on the sands.

Surely you did not imagine for one minute that I would demean myself by entering into the mock heroics and absurd gunplay of an ancient Western.

The true cause of my initial fixation was not highfaluting injustice, but lowest-level filthy lucre, and once I had come to that demeaning truth, the obsession gradually dispersed.

The demeaning task of working the land with slaves and riffraff who barely spoke any Istrian but grunted away in their own incomprehensible languages had further engendered in him a complete disregard for the sensibility of others, except when they were clearly in pain.

Carcassone, named Loba, or the Wolfess, the excess of his passion drove him over the country, howling like a wolf, and demeaning himself more like an irrational beast than a rational man.

I said that I did desire to demean myself in the world, both as becometh a man and a Christian.

However, my feeling is that to have admitted praetors into the plebeian nobility would have demeaned the exclusivity of nobility too much.

Most of what she saw was small and demeaning stuff—masturbating boys peeking through knotholes at their undressed sisters, wives going through husbands' pockets, looking for extra money or tobacco, Sheb the piano-player licking the seat of the chair where his favorite whore had sat for awhile, a maid at Seafront spitting into Kimba Rimer's pillowcase after the Chancellor had kicked her for being slow in getting out of his way.

How far removed delicious, exquisite Feiqa was from the motivated artifices, the lies and fabrications, the propaganda, the demeaning, sterile, unsatisfying, reductive, negative superficialities of antibiological roles, the prescriptions of an unnatural and pathological politics, the manipulative instrumentations of monsters and freaks.

The hot-blooded Tribus clan considered it demeaning and humiliating to be forced to begas they considered itfor water.