traduce
Americanverb (used with object)
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traduces,
present (3rd person singular)
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traduced,
past participle, past
-
traducing
present participle
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
traducesimple
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traducessimple
-
have traducedperfect
-
has traducedperfect
-
am traducingprogressive
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are traducingprogressive
-
is traducingprogressive
-
have been traducingperfect progressive
-
has been traducingperfect progressive
Past
-
traducedsimple
-
had traducedperfect
-
was traducingprogressive
-
were traducingprogressive
-
had been traducingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of traduce
1525–35; < Latin trādūcere, variant of trānsdūcere to transfer, display, expose, equivalent to trāns- trans- + dūcere to lead
Explanation
To traduce is to badmouth someone or something. If you don't want people talking trash about you, then don't traduce them either — even if they started it. Among cabaret performers, there is long tradition of traducing other performers — though at its heart, it's really a way of showing affection. Showing love by being mean: such is the strange world of camp. Of course, in order to know that a person is being funny when they traduce another person, you usually have to know them both pretty well. So if you're not either very familiar or very funny, avoid traducing other people for laughs: they're likely to think that you meant all those nasty things.
Vocabulary lists containing traduce
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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.
See Examples For:
Artificial-intelligence researchers rush to create it, even though computer-as-brain metaphors traduce the complexity of human biology, at least for now.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 15, 2026
“The government will in no way traduce or criticize the work of the committee who are doing exactly what Parliament has asked them to do.”
From Washington Times ● Jun. 12, 2023
And did she somehow betray or traduce them, hold them in contempt or unjustifiably exploit them?
From Washington Post ● Sep. 26, 2022
Art for art’s sake recognized that if you subordinate art to an idea like “the greater good,” you traduce it.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 25, 2022
“Mrs. Watson,” he said, “I’d like to in- traduce you to your long-lost son from Siam, His Royal Highness, Yul Watson!”
From "The Watsons Go to Birmingham" by Christopher Paul Curtis
But valuing a forest for that purpose traduces what forests are.
From New York Times ● May 16, 2017
He traduces these great reformers and the doctrines of his own church, and yet was soon after made a bishop!!!—Ed.
From Works of John Bunyan — Volume 02 by John Bunyan
It traduces his best friends, and even his very wife.
From The English Stage Being an Account of the Victorian Drama by Augustin Filon
A wife and mother cannot thus absolve her own soul; she simply disgraces and traduces her holiest work.
From Maids Wives and Bachelors by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
He who traduces himself, sins with him who traduces another.
From Zenobia or, the Fall of Palmyra by William Ware
Ms Forbes says she does not know if seeing a public figure like her being "absolutely traduced" for her views has made them braver or more fearful.
From BBC ● Jun. 11, 2023
Or because Hoan Ton-That, the ingenious co-founder of Clearview, had once, like Thiel, been traduced by Gawker?
From The Guardian ● Jan. 25, 2020
More troubling, Bouvier has also traduced the idea of what an art dealer should be.
From The New Yorker ● Feb. 8, 2016
This is, after all, a regime that traduced all diplomatic norms by seizing the U.S.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2015
We have long been accustomed to be traduced and slandered.
From Nuts for Future Historians to Crack by Horace Wemyss Smith
It’s an approach now so mainstream that it’s become an orthodoxy of its own; it’s difficult to think of a writer today, of any genre, who doesn’t congratulate herself for traducing artificial binaries.
From New York Times ● Jul. 7, 2020
Yale has been seduced by a $150 million “bells and whistles” student center into traducing the best of what it and Holloway have stood for.
From Salon ● Sep. 21, 2019
So, wonderfully, traducing Microsoft across the Internet helps Sony, and vice versa.
From Forbes ● Nov. 5, 2013
On the contrary, for the purposes of animating the stage she hasn't done enough traducing: this often sounds like cut-out book pages walking around the stage.
From The Guardian ● Oct. 2, 2010
I knew Peter, and knew he could have no motive for traducing her.
From My Lady Rotha A Romance by Stanley J. Weyman
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
