malign
/məˈlʌɪn
/adjective
1Evil in nature or effect: she had a strong and malign influence...
- We should not believe that this malign aspect of human nature which sleeps in all of us has gone away or will ever go away.
- The place is populated by endearing eccentrics who eat seal-flipper pie and brood darkly on the sea's malign nature.
- The American Empire emerges, then, not as a complex phenomenon with some good effects and some malign ones.
Synonyms
harmful, evil, bad, baleful, hostile, inimical, destructive, malevolent, evil-intentioned, malignant, injurious, spiteful, malicious, vicious
literary malefic, maleficent
1.1 archaic (Of a disease) malignant.Therapeutic measures such as bleeding and purging, designed originally to get rid or excess or malign humours, continued to be used....
- But it was no match for the malign tumor, first detected just last spring, his colleagues said.
- After hours spent quelling the fire with cold water, ‘he succumbed to a fever so malign that in just a few days he expired in the icy embrace of death.’
verb [with object]
Speak about (someone) in a spitefully critical manner: don’t you dare malign her in my presence...
- But he denied the army had been maligning politicians to discredit them.
- He was also taken aback because he felt the PR consultant was maligning someone who was dead.
- Now that we have Camilla installed, her champion wrote, should we still be maligning this lady?
Synonyms
defame, slander, libel, blacken someone's name/character, smear, run a smear campaign against, vilify, speak ill of, spread lies about, accuse falsely, cast aspersions on, run down, misrepresent, calumniate, traduce, denigrate, disparage, slur, derogate, abuse, revile
informal bad-mouth, knock, drag through the mud/mire, throw/sling/fling mud at, do a hatchet job on
British informal rubbish, slag off
rare asperse, vilipend
Derivatives
maligner
/ noun ...- It's not simply, as the maligners would have it, a moneygrabbing procedure.
- In recent years, the internet has provided a new medium for malcontents and maligners to spread fiction as fact to a wide swath of the public through mass distributed e-mails.
- Kevin also gives himself the opportunity to vent a lot of anger and frustration out at the film industry, Internet maligners and, um, more Internet maligners.
malignity
/ noun ...- He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.
- Despite their obvious malignity, so pronounced as to have raised clinical questions, Mr Latham's own diagnoses are not entirely faulty.
- The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and joyous malignity that staggers and appalls me.
malignly
/ adverb ...- But don't let them lurk deep in your soul's most secret crannies, malignly pulling strings and making you act out in absurd ways.
- What unites the tyrannical of this world is the human instinct to obey, and to conform, an instinct malignly exploited by evil leaders.
- However, the other woman is not helping and is staring malignly at me.
Origin
Middle English: via Old French maligne (adjective), malignier (verb), based on Latin malignus 'tending to evil', from malus 'bad'.