The opposite of “hyperbole”

Recently, I noticed someone ask on Twitter what the opposite of hyperbole is:

A few people suggested understatement, but the original asker didn’t think that quite captured what they were looking for.

But then this tweet came along:

And that intrigued me. I hadn’t seen the word litote before (and oddly, neither had Google Chrome as I was writing the draft for this post).

So, I looked it up. Merriam Webster confirms:

litotes n.
li·​to·​tes | \ ˈlī-tə-ˌtēz , ˈli-, lī-ˈtō-ˌtēz \
plural: litotes

understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary (as in “not a bad singer” or “not unhappy”)

Is it a new word for you, too? Well, you probably have encountered it though. It’s when we say something negatively to mean something that’s positive.

For example, if someone asks how your drive to work was this morning, you might respond with, “Not bad”, rather than “Good.”

Here are a few other examples:

  • When you’re ecstatic about something, but you say, “I’m not disappointed.”
  • When you describe an attractive someone as “not ugly”.
  • When you find someone’s feedback beneficial, but you say, “That wasn’t useless feedback.”
  • When someone says something you agree with, but you say, “I can’t disagree with that.”
  • When someone is all dressed up for an event, but you say, “You don’t look too shabby”.

Any of that seem familiar? Litotes is a common rhetorical device that many of us use all the time, without even knowing it had a name.

And in case you’re wondering, the adjectival form of litotes is litotical, similar to how hyperbolic is the adjectival form of hyperbole.

Do you have a word you’d like to know the opposite for? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see what I can discover.

By Kim Siever

I am a copywriter and copyeditor. I blog on writing and social media tips mostly, but I sometimes throw in my thoughts about running a small business. Follow me on Twitter at @hotpepper.