trivialize
Americanverb (used with object)
-
trivializes,
present (3rd person singular)
-
trivialized,
past participle, past
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trivializing
present participle
verb
Usage
What does trivialize mean? Trivialize means to cause something to appear unimportant or insignificant, as in Gabe tried to trivialize the D he got in math, but his parents still grounded him. Trivialize is a verb form of the adjective trivial. It’s often used by the person being trivialized, rather than by the person doing the trivializing. Example: Do not trivialize the effort that was put into my project.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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trivializesimple
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trivializessimple
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have trivializedperfect
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has trivializedperfect
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am trivializingprogressive
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are trivializingprogressive
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is trivializingprogressive
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have been trivializingperfect progressive
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has been trivializingperfect progressive
Past
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trivializedsimple
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had trivializedperfect
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was trivializingprogressive
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were trivializingprogressive
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had been trivializingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of trivialize
Explanation
When you trivialize something, you make it seem less important than it really is. Some people complain that TV news tends to trivialize complicated political stories. If your friend tends to trivialize your problems and worries, he dismisses them as being too small to fret about, which might make you feel like he's not taking you seriously. If you trivialize your own health concerns, other people might not realize how sick you're feeling. When you trivialize an issue, you make it look more trivial than it is, or less significant. The Latin root of both trivialize and trivial is trivialis, "common, commonplace, or vulgar."
Vocabulary lists containing trivialize
Martin Scorsese on Cinema
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The Big Thirst
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"How the Media Twists the News"
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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:
We don’t want to hear commencement speeches about how we cannot outrun AI domination because they trivialize the work we have done ourselves.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 4, 2026
DR: We certainly do not want to give off the impression that we tolerate any bit of misinformation or harmful content or trivialize the impact it has, especially to those people that it does affect.
From Salon ● Oct. 25, 2024
“The clarity of Assemblyman Gabriel’s legislation is necessary to change the current dynamic in which governments, museums, and collectors are incentivized to resist restitution and employ tactics and arguments that trivialize the Holocaust,” Dubbin said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 28, 2024
“I expressed my concerns at the end of June because delinquents had used video game habits to trivialize the violence on social networks,” he said.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 17, 2023
Visual analysis can help us to appreciate the beauty of a masterpiece, but we must be careful not to use a formulaic approach that would trivialize it.
From "History of Art, Volume 1" by H.W. Janson
Kercher’s sister, Stephanie Kercher, told the BBC this week that Knox’s show trivializes the murder of her sister in Perugia, where the two women were students almost two decades ago.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 7, 2026
Meme-driven AI content that trivializes conflict as it spreads misinformation is increasingly crowding out reality on digital platforms, in what ISD researchers call the "Legofication" of war propaganda.
From Barron's ● Apr. 2, 2026
Others scoff that calling it a slur trivializes real oppression.
From Slate ● Aug. 31, 2025
The author repeatedly says his goal is not "equating" the men—as "it trivializes Hitler's obscene crimes to compare them to Trump's often pathetic foibles."
From Salon ● Aug. 22, 2023
Although there may be some truth in both hypotheses, this sort of posthumous off-the-rack psychoanalysis is a dubious, highly speculative enterprise that inevitably demeans and trivializes the absent analysand.
From "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
The issue has been trivialized to the point of being "presented as a form of therapy", argued Trudo Lemmens, a health law professor at the University of Toronto.
From Barron's ● Feb. 25, 2026
Cobb didn’t find much to read about menopause, beyond shoddy research and medical tracts which trivialized or pathologized what she knew to be a natural phase of life.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 7, 2026
Popular culture traps us in the privatized universe of celebrity culture, urging us to define ourselves through the often empty and trivialized and highly individualized interests of celebrities.
From Salon ● Feb. 25, 2025
"And I feel like for so long, PMS has been mocked and kind of trivialized, and people don't really take it seriously."
From BBC ● Aug. 12, 2024
Hellenistic rulers, it is said, trivialized Greek civic life by reducing it to pompous pageantry and contests over who could best flatter the king.
From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro
It’s not trivializing this summit or missing the point, I would argue, to understand it as first and foremost a semiotic spectacle, conducted through language, symbols and signifiers.
From Salon ● May 17, 2026
Some Chinese commentators have warned against trivializing the war for the sake of reaching new audiences.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 27, 2025
Christopher Nolan’s movie has no interest in reducing the atomic bombings of Japan to a trivializing, exploitative spectacle, despite what some would want.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 11, 2023
Plantation museums, including those dedicated to the nation’s first presidents, have been justly criticized for marginalizing, trivializing or even erasing enslavement from their presentations of history.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 29, 2022
It is not the dangerous knowledge which must be avoided, but it is the trivializing influence of a steady contact with things which are not worth knowing.
From The Photoplay A Psychological Study by Hugo Münsterberg
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.
