[
UK
/mˈɔːtɪfˌaɪɪŋ/
]
ADJECTIVE
-
causing to feel shame or chagrin or vexation
it was mortifying to know he had heard every word
the embarrassing moment when she found her petticoat down around her ankles -
causing awareness of your shortcomings
golf is a humbling game
How To Use mortifying In A Sentence
- In the opening to The Human Stain, author Philip Roth's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, describes the summer of 1998, when "Bill Clinton's secret" - about Monica - "emerged in every last mortifying detail - every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data. Michael Takiff: Bill Clinton, Still the Biggest Dog in Town
- To detect the pheromones in that urine some mammals touch the liquid and do a distinctive, mortifying, lip-curling grimace called flehmen. INSIDE OF A DOG
- As Dave Lopez, the state's secretary of commerce and tourism told me at a breakfast last month, the answer was as mortifying as being the last kid picked for a sandlot ball game; United executives "couldn't imagine living in Oklahoma. Christine Negroni: Thunder and Aerospace A Winning Combination
- She felt it would be utterly mortifying to be seen in such company as his by anyone. MISS MELVILLE REGRETS
- Margaret, with feigned simplicity, but far from being sorry at heart, that she had found an indirect mode of mortifying her monitress. The Fortunes of Nigel
- Which could, obviously, be socially mortifying for her adolescent sons. Times, Sunday Times
- His path was called ‘the Middle Way’, between life in society (seeking pleasures) and the life of a rigorous ascetic (fasting and mortifying the flesh).
- F-Word Brenda, as she's known wherever the ghosts of Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman take tea, recalls the mortifying experience of promoting her memoir The Nearly Departed, a succession of embarrassments certain to give any writer a sympathetic shudder. The Plinth and the Pauper (mildly updated): James Wolcott
- When one considers impartially, the merit of a rich suit of clothes in most places, the respect and the smiles of favour it procures, not to speak of the envy and the sighs it occasions (which is very often the principal charm to the wearer), one is forced to confess, that there is need of an uncommon understanding to resift the temptation of pleasing friends and mortifying rivals; and that it is natural to young people to fall into a folly, which betrays them to that want of money which is the source of a thousand basenesses (sic). Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e
- How do you quantify the value of these mortifying but essential experiences? Times, Sunday Times
