Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To stress or emphasize; intensify.
- transitive verb To pronounce with a stress or accent.
- transitive verb To mark with an accent.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To mark or pronounce with an accent or with accents; place an accent or accents on. To lay stress upon; emphasize; give prominence to; mark as of importance: as, he accentuated the views of the party on this question.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To pronounce with an accent or with accents.
- transitive verb To bring out distinctly; to make prominent; to emphasize.
- transitive verb To mark with the written accent.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive To
pronounce with anaccent or vocalstress . - verb transitive To bring out
distinctly ; to makeprominent ; toemphasize . - verb transitive To mark with a written accent.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb to stress, single out as important
- verb put stress on; utter with an accent
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
Support
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Examples
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Is the word accentuate a good word to tell in morning assembly?
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But for the most part I actually "accentuate" my brows with a bit of Bobby Brown light brown eyebrow shadow.
Golden Arches kittenpie 2007
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And at night especially that cold air wants to drain and kind of accentuate it with these Santa Ana offshore winds and compressed heated and that's what we've got.
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You kind of accentuate the positives on either side as opposed to a Brewers broadcast when you're putting everything - even the other team's success - into a Brewers perspective.
OnMilwaukee.com 2008
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"kind of accentuate the positive work the authority is doing."
SplicedFeed 2010
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Those on the left side accentuate anger, hate, jealousy, and selfishness.
The Bushman Way of Tracking God PhD Bradford Keeney 2010
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This will always be handy and already help accentuate the area.
Eve Pearl: "How To" Beauty -- Quick & Easy Breast Enhancement Eve Pearl 2011
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My recommendation is that women identify and embrace those attributes that make them beautiful, and then learn to accentuate them.
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Hmmmm, but Palin isn't black, doesn't have Oprah's megamillions to image make her and doesn't have Oprah's influence on the media to contain her negatives and accentuate her positives.
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This will always be handy and already help accentuate the area.
Eve Pearl: "How To" Beauty -- Quick & Easy Breast Enhancement Eve Pearl 2011
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