sugarcoat

See also: sugar coat, and sugar-coat

English

Alternative forms

• sugar coat, sugar-coat

Etymology

From sugar +‎ coat; figurative sense from the practice of coating medicinal tablets or pills with sugar in order to disguise their unpleasant taste (sugarcoating the pill).

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈʃʊɡɚˌkoʊt/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈʃʊɡəˌkəʊt/
• Hyphenation: sug‧ar‧coat

Verb

sugarcoat (third-person singular simple present sugarcoats, present participle sugarcoating, simple past and past participle sugarcoated)

1. (transitive) To coat with sugar.
2. (transitive, figurative) To make superficially more attractive; to give a falsely pleasant appearance to.

   Synonyms: candy-coat, gild, gild the pill, sugarcoat the pill

   There's no way to sugarcoat the loss of the space shuttle; it was an unmitigated disaster.

   • 1876 November 1, Mark Twain, “Letter to Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis”, in The Letters Of Mark Twain,‎, volume 3:

     I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable […]

   • 2022 March 23, Barack Obama, 2:52 from the start, in Centennial Celebration Conversation with President Barack Obama and Yo-Yo Ma‎, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, via YouTube:

     […] And I don't think we can sugarcoat both the human toll that is unfolding in Ukraine, but also how it is reordering the international architecture in ways that we haven't seen in decades.

   • 2023 October 12, HarryBlank, “Fire in the Hole”, in SCP Foundation‎, archived from the original on 2 September 2024:

     "The insurgents killed them all?"
     "Very likely." Scout's expression was kindly, but he was apparently not the sort to sugarcoat things. Then again, maybe he had simply read her receptivity well.

Derived terms

• sugarcoat a bitter pill
• sugarcoated (adjective)
• sugarcoating (noun)

Translations

to coat with sugar

German: verzuckern Hungarian: cukormázzal önt le / von be

to give a falsely pleasant appearance

Bulgarian: захаросвам (bg) (zaharosvam) Chinese: 粉飾／粉饰 (zh) (fěnshì) Finnish: kaunistella (fi) German: beschönigen (de), schönreden (de) Hungarian: szépít (hu) Norwegian: rosemale Polish: słodzić (pl) Russian: смягчать (ru) (smjaxčatʹ) Spanish: maquillar (es), salpimentar (es), asainetear (es)