I suspect this is going to be a "oh yeah, duh" moment, but I'm looking for a word that is like "negate," but worse. Here's an example sentence:
I could cram for this test all night, but the sleep deprivation I'd experience could negate the effort.
I believe this sentence means, "cramming for the test could be canceled out by the sleep deprivation." But what I really want to say is, "the negatives of sleep deprivation could be worse than the benefits of cramming.
Is there a word with the latter meaning that could be swapped out for negate in the example sentence?
EDIT: I probably wasn't clear because a lot of the answers are giving me stronger words with the same meaning of "negate." But I'm looking for a word with a different, yet related, meaning.
May be tagging it with synonyms because the confusion. But whenever I look up synonyms in a thesaurus, the list includes words with closely related meanings, too.
Negate, nullify, void, etc. can be interpreted as bringing you back to zero. I'm not looking for that, I'm looking for a word that fits the first example and means net negative.
Best Answer
I think outweigh conveys the right meaning here
e.g. "The benefits outweigh the risks."
The sentence in the question would be
A synonym that also works here is "outbalance", but that's much less commonly used.