What is pejoration?

Pejoration is when a word or phrase starts out friendly or cool but becomes mean or uncool over time.

Imagine your favorite snack is chocolate chips. You love them because they’re sweet and crunchy. But one day, someone says, “I hate chocolate chips, they’re just crunchy blobs.” Now the word crunchy blobs sounds silly and not so cool anymore. That’s like pejoration: a once-cool thing becomes uncool or funny in a mean way.

Sometimes people use words differently, and that changes how we feel about them. A word might start as something nice, like silly, but if someone says “you’re the silliest person I know,” it can sound a bit mean. It’s like turning a fun game into a joke.

Think of the word nerd. Once, it was just a way to say someone liked books or math. Now it can be used as a pejorative, a word that shows dislike, when people say “he’s such a nerd,” meaning he’s kind of strange or uncool.

So pejoration is like turning something fun into something not-so-fun, just by using it in the right (or wrong!) way.