sugarcoat

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See also: sugar coat and sugar-coat

English[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

sugar +‎ coat; figurative sense from the practice of coating medicinal tablets or pills with sugar in order to disguise their unpleasant taste (sugarcoating the pill).

Pronunciation[edit]

Verb[edit]

sugarcoat (third-person singular simple present sugarcoats, present participle sugarcoating, simple past and past participle sugarcoated)

  1. (transitive) To coat with sugar.
  2. (transitive, figurative) To make superficially more attractive; to give a falsely pleasant appearance to.
    Synonyms: candy-coat, gild, gild the pill, sugarcoat the pill
    There's no way to sugarcoat the loss of the space shuttle; it was an unmitigated disaster.
    • 1876 November 1, Mark Twain, “Letter to Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis”, in The Letters Of Mark Twain,[1], volume 3:
      I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable []
    • 2022 March 23, Barack Obama, 2:52 from the start, in Centennial Celebration Conversation with President Barack Obama and Yo-Yo Ma[2], Chicago Council on Global Affairs, via YouTube:
      [] And I don't think we can sugarcoat both the human toll that is unfolding in Ukraine, but also how it is reordering the international architecture in ways that we haven't seen in decades.

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