Expand
Expand verb - To make greater in size, amount, or number.
Usage example: we had to expand the list of wedding guests several times in order to accommodate all the relatives Mother wouldn't dream of excluding
Reduce
Reduce verb - To make smaller in amount, volume, or extent.
Usage example: you'll have to reduce the amount of money you spend on unnecessary purchases if you want to have any money left for retirement
Common collocations
Both words in one sentence
- Thankfully by Aria of Sorrow, IGA and company wisely started consolidating the castle designs and expand the number of warp spots from then on to reduce all of that needless backtracking.
Source: Space-Filling Path -
Even though montages are designed to compress time, you can always reduce the compression an arbitrary amount, making the montage expand to fit whatever time it needs.
Source: Padding -
While it's theoretically possible to have this penalty reduce back down to 0 over time, in practice you can (and probably should) expand faster than the penalty decays.
Source: Video Game / Total War: Shogun 2
Cite this Source
Reduce and Expand. (2016). Retrieved 2026, July 21, from https://thesaurus.plus/related/expand/reduce
Expand & Reduce. N.p., 2016. Web. 21 Jul. 2026. <https://thesaurus.plus/related/expand/reduce>.
Reduce or Expand. 2016. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://thesaurus.plus/related/expand/reduce.
Google Ngram Viewer shows how "expand" and "reduce" have occurred on timeline