badmouth

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See also: bad-mouth

English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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Calque of a Mande term, perhaps Vai [Term?][1] or Mandinka [Term?],[2] which entered English via Gullah [Term?].[3] Compare Japanese 悪口(わるぐち) (waruguchi, badmouthing), which is a compound of (わる) (waru, bad, wicked) and (くち) (kuchi, mouth).

Pronunciation

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Verb

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badmouth (third-person singular simple present badmouths, present participle badmouthing, simple past and past participle badmouthed)

  1. (informal, transitive) To criticize or malign, especially unfairly or spitefully.
    • 1987 August 30, Benedict Nightingale, “Theater: England's Endless Love Affair with Farce”, in The New York Times[1], retrieved 22 July 2013:
      [] those cross-Atlantic aficionados who persistently idolize the British theater and bad-mouth Broadway.
    • 2023 December 9, Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz, Mike Isaac, Karen Weise, “Inside OpenAI’s Crisis Over the Future of Artificial Intelligence”, in The New York Times[2], →ISSN:
      He also believed that Mr. Altman was bad-mouthing the board to OpenAI executives, two people with knowledge of the situation said.

Derived terms

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Translations

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References

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  1. ^ bad-mouth”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
  2. ^ Smitherman, Geneva (1977), Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin)
  3. ^ The Atlantic World, 1450-2000 (2008), →ISBN, page 58