ameliorate
verb/əˈmiːli.əɹeɪt/
Etymology Alteration of meliorate after French améliorer.
1
To make better, or improve, something perceived to be in a negative condition.
- They offered some compromises in an effort to ameliorate the situation.
- In every human being there is a wish to ameliorate his own condition.1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter III, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC:
2 more examples
- Unless... you could help me find a third party. [...] Someone who can... ameliorate the situation.2011, Peter Gould, “Problem Dog”, in Breaking Bad, season 4, episode 7 (television production), spoken by Walter White (Bryan Cranston):
- We further show that an implementable rule for the central bank's long bond portfolio significantly ameliorates the adverse consequences of a binding ZLB on the policy rate.2023, Eric Sims, Jing Cynthia Wu, and Ji Zhang, The Four-Equation New Keynesian Model, The Review of Economics and Statistics 105(4), pp. 931--947
2
To become better; improve.
- Antonyms
- deteriorate, worsen
- Derived terms
- amelioratingly, ameliorator, amelioratory
- Related terms
- amelioration, ameliorative, ameliorable, inameliorable, meliorate, alleviate, mitigate