Disheartening means causing someone to lose confidence, hope, or enthusiasm. When something is disheartening, it makes you feel discouraged or deflated, like the air going out of a balloon.

Getting back a test with a lower grade than you expected can be disheartening, especially if you studied hard. Watching your soccer team lose game after game can be disheartening. When a scientist's experiment fails for the tenth time, it's disheartening, even though failure is part of the scientific process.

The word comes from losing heart, which means losing courage or determination. Something disheartening makes you sad in a specific way: it makes you feel like giving up or questioning whether your efforts matter. A single piece of criticism might sting, but a disheartening experience makes you wonder if you should keep trying at all.

Notice that what feels disheartening depends on what you care about. A disheartening loss matters because you invested effort and hope. The opposite of disheartening is heartening or encouraging, those moments when you feel your confidence and determination renewed.