maligned

[muh-lahynd]

adjective

1. spoken ill of; defamed or slandered.

   I pointed to my unweeded yard full of bees and waxed rhapsodic about the benefits of the maligned dandelion.

   Considered by many to be a usurper and murderer, Richard III is one of the most maligned kings in history.

verb

1. the simple past tense and past participle of malign.

Other Word Forms

• unmaligned adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of maligned¹

malign ( def. ) + -ed ² ( def. )

Example Sentences

They are both the most revered and the most maligned cooks in our culture.

From Salon

And there was Kershaw, after his maligned bullpen danced through danger and barely survived, admitting that maybe this game meant a little more.

From Los Angeles Times

"Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way."

From BBC

In 2019 he described the disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield as the "most unfairly maligned person in modern history" and told a crowd in Washington that "any just society" would be building statues of him.

From BBC

Romance has been a "maligned genre" within the industry that "some people just didn't want to be associated with," she says.

From BBC