mortified
Americanadjective
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humiliated, ashamed, or deeply embarrassed.
Sternly lectured by the principal in front of her friends, my daughter felt suitably mortified and hopefully will never do such a thing again.
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Pathology. affected with gangrene or necrosis.
The removal of mortified tissue from wounds enables faster healing.
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of mortified
Explanation
To be mortified is to be extremely embarrassed. If your pants fell down in class, you'd be mortified. In science, mortified describes body tissue that's severely decayed. But the most common meaning of this word has to do with hurt feelings, not rotting flesh. You're mortified when you're so ashamed or embarrassed that you wish you could just shrivel up and die — kind of like mortified flesh, actually. Though people get embarrassed often, being mortified is a little more rare and a lot more severe. It means about the same as humiliated.
Vocabulary lists containing mortified
The Book Thief
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The Devil's Arithmetic
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Stargirl
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Mortified, she enters the studio in a garbled flurry of apologies.
From BBC • Sep. 15, 2025
Mortified that he had witnessed her rant, she posted a TikTok attempting to clear the air.
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 5, 2024
Mortified by his increasing physical squalor, Jamie was also dismayed by the entourage that surrounded him away from home.
From The New Yorker • Jun. 18, 2018
At Mortified, adults share excerpts from their diaries, bad teenage poetry, love letters from summer camp or notes passed in 10th grade math class.
From Washington Post • Feb. 8, 2018
Mortified, the Livermore team canceled a second test.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
