0 to describe something in a way that makes it seem less important, serious, bad, etc. than it really is: --
She believes the research understates the amount of discrimination women suffer.
1 to say that the amount or importance of something is less than it really is: --
2 to give an amount as less than it really is: --
The company's conservative accounting methods mean that results are actually understated.
3 to make something seem less serious or important than it really is: --
This almost certainly understates their overall environmental performance in the entire period, and thus biases the results against finding a strong effect of neo-corporatism.
He also understates the extent and energy of industrialization, social change and class- and ethnic-based politics in other southern cities.
Thus, statistics that tabulate the hardware of access greatly understate the number of people who sign on in a week.
Such an approach runs the risk of understating those aspects of relationships which change only slowly.
Because we cannot distinguish between non-affiliates and affiliates, who have a higher labor force participation rate, we probably understate the labor force attachment of affiliates.
They also understate the coherence of societal relations which bind members of different life course stages or of (coeval) generations.
To the extent that this assumption is incorrect, the table will understate the change consequent upon the married women's property acts.
The graph understates the total investment in 1983 since a third of the short-term pain took the form of immediate benefit cuts, not captured here.
