sugarcoat
See also: sugar coat and sugar-coat
English
Alternative forms
- sugar coat, sugar-coat
Etymology
sugar + coat; figurative sense from the practice of coating medicinal tablets or pills with sugar in order to disguise their unpleasant taste (sugarcoating the pill).
Pronunciation
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈʃʊɡɚˌkoʊt/
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈʃʊɡəˌkəʊt/
- Hyphenation: sug‧ar‧coat
Verb
sugarcoat (third-person singular simple present sugarcoats, present participle sugarcoating, simple past and past participle sugarcoated)
- (transitive) To coat with sugar.
- (transitive, figuratively) To make superficially more attractive; to give a falsely pleasant appearance to.
- Synonyms: gild, gild the pill, sugarcoat the pill, whitewash
- There's no way to sugarcoat the loss of the space shuttle; it was an unmitigated disaster.
- 1876 November 1, Mark Twain, “Letter to Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis”, in The Letters Of Mark Twain,, volume 3:
- I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable […]
- 2022 March 23, Obama, Barack, Centennial Celebration Conversation with President Barack Obama and Yo-Yo Ma, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2:52 from the start:
- […] And I don't think we can sugarcoat both the human toll that is unfolding in Ukraine, but also how it is reordering the international architecture in ways that we haven't seen in decades.
Derived terms
- sugarcoated (adjective)
- sugarcoating (noun)
Translations
to coat with sugar
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to give a falsely pleasant appearance
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