overrepresent

English

Etymology

From over- +‎ represent.

Verb

overrepresent (third-person singular simple present overrepresents, present participle overrepresenting, simple past and past participle overrepresented)

  1. (transitive) To represent as being higher or greater than it is.
    • 2010 November 16, Roslyn Sulcas, “Young Ballet-Makers Elaborate on Technique”, in The New York Times‎[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 3 February 2018:
      Ms. LeCrone was the only woman, probably overrepresenting the general percentage of female ballet choreographers, but perhaps the most experienced of the group.
    • 2020 November 10, Ronald Brownstein, “Why the Senate is so tough for Democrats”, in CNN‎[2], Atlanta, Ga.: Warner Bros. Discovery, archived from the original on 24 May 2024:
      “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.
    • 2022 November 3, Harmeet Kaur, “How Asian Americans fit into the affirmative action debate”, in CNN‎[3], Atlanta, Ga.: Warner Bros. Discovery, archived from the original on 9 November 2024:
      Asian Americans are overrepresented in both elite universities like Harvard and also in community colleges.
    • 2023 July 15, Zachary B. Wolf, “Here is the CNN polling director’s advice for reading polls”, in CNN‎[4], Atlanta, Ga.: Warner Bros. Discovery, archived from the original on 23 July 2023:
      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.
    • 2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Locality in Language Processing” (chapter 4), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 131:
      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.

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