- 1
To demoralize someone is to take away their courage or confidence so they feel they cannot win, or cannot do the job. Bad news can demoralize a team. Unfair criticism can demoralize a student. You can demoralize one person or a whole group. It is stronger than “disappoint”: they may still be standing there, but the fight has gone out of them. Formal enough for news and work; at home people more often say “it knocked us down” or “we lost heart.” From French démoraliser. American spelling; British often demoralise. Though actually, the French word first meant to spoil someone’s morals. English kept the shape and moved the meaning toward spirit — so do not hear “make them ” in it today.
打擊士氣、使喪失信心
組成from French démoraliser
同家族的字
- moralegroup spirit and confidence — the thing this verb attacks
- demoralizationthe noun for the process or the state
- moralsame Latin root as the older “spoil someone’s morals” sense; not what English usually means now
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
demoralizeverb/dɪˈmɒɹəlaɪz/
- 1
To destroy the morale of; to dishearten.
- 2
datedTo erode the moral adherence of; to corrupt.
- [I]f you convert a man brought up in another creed, you inevitably demoralize him.
- The election of a man like Mr. Blaine would be such an encouragement to the base and rapacious impulses apt to govern the conduct of politicians, it would so demoralize the public mind and open the floodgates of corruption so wide, that it is no exaggeration to say the success of our free institutions is at stake.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。