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In its best-established sense denigrate means "attack a reputation." However, it is now often found in sentences like I don't mean to denigrate the problem, where its meaning has become closer to "disparage or belittle somebody or something." In this, it is following in the footsteps of deprecate, whose traditional meaning is "express condemnation of somebody or something," but which in self-deprecating has taken on the additional sense of "belittle."
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