MEANING
A harmful effect that leaves someone or something worse off.
Use it for
identifying who loses from a policy; describing a trade-off that harms another goal; showing that an advantage has a damaging costMakes the harmed interest explicit when discussing costs or trade-offs. Academic functions: Significance / Scope, Causation / Relationships.
Words that belong together
- to the detriment of
- a detriment to
- without detriment to
On the page
The funding rule favored short projects to the detriment of research requiring sustained observation.
The analysis asks whether efficiency can increase without detriment to service quality.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- detriment
Usage notes
Usually uncountable: to the detriment of, without detriment to. A detriment to can denote a particular harmful influence; plural detriments is possible but less usual. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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