Deprecate - depreciate

These are two verbs that are sometimes confused. The same is true of the equivalent nouns deprecation and depreciation - and the adjectives deprecating and depreciating.

• To deprecate, pronounced with a hard 'c', is a word whose meaning has changed. Originally, it meant 'to pray that something would not happen'. It came to mean 'to express strong disapproval of, or regret for, something that had happened': 'The Vice-Chancellor strongly deprecated the behaviour of the students who had rioted'. Recently it has come to be used much more to mean 'to express modesty by understating one's virtues': '"Here is a little idea I had," he said deprecatingly about his new book.' (This word, according to many pedants, is wrongly used thus, and should be depreciatingly. See below.)

• To depreciate, pronounced with a sibilant 's' sound, means 'to lower the price of, to sell short, to say something is worth less than the hearer thought'. In Economics, it can be used intransitively to mean 'lose value' - 'The pound depreciated against the dollar'.

It is common now to hear a person who 'sells himself short', who speaks belittlingly of his own character, abilities etc., described as self-deprecatory. This is common, and indeed is part of the current English language. But those who like precision, and historical precision at that, would rather see the use of self-depreciatory instead. It is a word whose history is more closely linked to the idea that is being expressed.

These two words were included by the brothers Fowler as a malaprop, a form of malapropism, in their group Malaprop 4, in The King's English (1931).