Dictionary

overrepresent en · VERB

Etymology

From over- + represent.

Meanings

1. (transitive) To represent as being higher or greater than it is.
   • Asian Americans are overrepresented in both elite universities like Harvard and also in community colleges. 2022 November 3, Harmeet Kaur, “How Asian Americans fit into the affirmative action debate”, in CNN:
   • “The Senate is so tough for Democrats because the Senate so overrepresents these sparsely populated rural states,” says Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who has extensively studied the relationship between presidential and congressional voting. 2020 November 10, Ronald Brownstein, “Why the Senate is so tough for Democrats”, in CNN:
   • The stories were naturally occurring short narrative or nonfiction materials that had been edited in order to overrepresent rare words and syntactic constructions without compromising perceived naturalness. 2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Locality in Language Processing” (chapter 4), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 131:
   • Those with more formal education are more likely to take polls, and with an electorate newly divided by education in the Trump era, those polls that didn’t adjust for it tended to overrepresent those with college degrees who were less likely to back Donald Trump. 2023 July 15, Zachary B. Wolf, “Here is the CNN polling director’s advice for reading polls”, in CNN:
   • Ms. LeCrone was the only woman, probably overrepresenting the general percentage of female ballet choreographers, but perhaps the most experienced of the group. 2010 November 16, Roslyn Sulcas, “Young Ballet-Makers Elaborate on Technique”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 03 Feb 2018:

Forms

Antonyms

underrepresent

Relateds

overrepresentation

Translations (9)

es sobrerrepresentar (Translations) · fr surreprésenter (Translations) · it sovrarappresentare (Translations) · pl nadreprezentować (Translations) · pt sobrerrepresentar (Translations) · ca sobrerepresentar (Translations) · gl sobrerrepresentar (Translations) · fi olla yliedustettuna (Translations) · fi yliedustaa (Translations)