bowdlerize

verb
/ˈbaʊd.ləˌɹaɪz/UK/ˈbaʊd.ləɹˌaɪz/US

Etymology

From Bowdler + -ize; named after English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825). In 1818, he published a censored version of William Shakespeare (The Family Shakespeare), expurgating “those words and expressions […] which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”

Definitions

  1. To remove or alter those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise…

    To remove or alter those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly.

    • The bowdlerized version of the novel, while free of vulgarity, was also free of flavor.
  2. Alternative form of bowdlerize.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for bowdlerize. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA