DISCOURAGING

Pronunciation (US):

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IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does discouraging mean? 

• DISCOURAGING (adjective)
  The adjective DISCOURAGING has 2 senses:

1. depriving of confidence or hope or enthusiasm and hence often deterring action

2. expressing disapproval in order to dissuade

  Familiarity information: DISCOURAGING used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DISCOURAGING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Depriving of confidence or hope or enthusiasm and hence often deterring action

Context example:

where never is heard a discouraging word

Similar:

daunting; intimidating (discouraging through fear)

demoralising; demoralizing; disheartening; dispiriting (destructive of morale and self-reliance)

frustrating (discouraging by hindering)

unencouraging (not encouraging)

Also:

unhelpful (providing no assistance)

hopeless (without hope because there seems to be no possibility of comfort or success)

dissuasive (deterring from action)

Antonym:

encouraging (giving courage or confidence or hope)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Expressing disapproval in order to dissuade

Similar:

dissuasive (deterring from action)

 Context examples 

“My publishers gave me a most discouraging account of its sale. You are yourself, I presume, a medical man?”

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Leaving the others to console Beth, she departed to the kitchen, which was in a most discouraging state of confusion.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I passed three days in a luxury of wretchedness, torturing myself by putting every conceivable variety of discouraging construction on all that ever had taken place between Dora and me.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

It focused on helping smokers who want to quit, protecting nonsmokers from tobacco smoke, and discouraging the use of tobacco products among children.

(American Stop Smoking Intervention for Cancer Prevention, NCI Thesaurus)

My aunt being supremely indifferent to Mrs. Crupp's opinion and everybody else's, and rather favouring than discouraging the idea, Mrs. Crupp, of late the bold, became within a few days so faint-hearted, that rather than encounter my aunt upon the staircase, she would endeavour to hide her portly form behind doors—leaving visible, however, a wide margin of flannel petticoat—or would shrink into dark corners.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)