detrimental
Americanadjective
noun
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of detrimental
Explanation
Detrimental is a formal way of saying "harmful." Anything detrimental hurts, hinders, or puts a damper on something. Detrimental things do damage. Have you ever heard "Smoking may be detrimental to your health" and wondered what it meant? It means that smoking is bad for your health: it's going to harm you in a bunch of ways. Detrimental is a more official, formal way of talking about things that do harm. A dog who likes digging holes can be detrimental to a garden. If you're writing a paper and want to pick an alternative to harmful that sounds more formal, detrimental is a great choice.
Vocabulary lists containing detrimental
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "D"
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This Week in Words: January 27 - February 2, 2018
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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.
"AI can also have a detrimental impact on climate change from that angle," said Maria Joao Sousa, executive director of Climate Change AI, a nonprofit promoting the use of AI for climate action.
From Barron's ● Oct. 15, 2026
“If playing a game can substitute for doing something that’s detrimental, 100%, that’s great. Go for it.”
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 13, 2026
Conditional approval is better than a rejection, but the message from the state and the county is fairly consistent: Making the necessary cuts will be hard and detrimental; not making them would be disastrous.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2026
“Cultivating adolescents’ future time perspective is therefore crucial to counteract short-form video addiction’s detrimental effects and bolster their academic buoyancy,” the study’s authors wrote.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 3, 2026
It suggested that he must have made — or been planning to make — more Horcruxes, so that the loss of his first would not be so detrimental.
From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling
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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.
