vulgarize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make vulgar or coarse; lower; debase.
to vulgarize standards of behavior.
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to make (a technical or abstruse work) easier to understand and more widely known; popularize.
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to translate (a work) from a classical language into the vernacular.
verb
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to make commonplace or vulgar; debase
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to make (something little known or difficult to understand) widely known or popular among the public; popularize
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of vulgarize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In “Children of Light,” his Hollywood novel, he wrote: “There are people at this table who could vulgarize pure light.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2020
James Ellroy served as one of two grand masters for the awards, saying, "We are here to vulgarize literature."
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 30, 2015
Solzhenitsyn's world is one of almost private Russian concern and grief, which no Westerner may lightly enter or vulgarize in glib anti-Communist terms.
From Time Magazine Archive
Many Britons had feared that televising the coronation would vulgarize it, but even the London Times observed that "posterity may well judge the telecast one of the wisest acts."
From Time Magazine Archive
His use of the word "haughty" is so fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it.
From Ralph Waldo Emerson by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Things are put a good deal more strongly in the film, although they have not vulgarized but only underscored James’ subtext.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 6, 2018
Ninotchka’s personhood is diminished, even as the composer’s work is vulgarized.
From New York Times ● Aug. 19, 2016
And, in a vulgarized form Rand would almost certainly reject, they have spread even further since her death in 1982.
From Salon ● Oct. 6, 2014
On it he croons in a talky flow about a manuscript — or is it a love letter? this song? his career? — that he fears will be vulgarized by commercial forces.
From New York Times ● Aug. 20, 2011
Chapelain and Balzac vulgarized the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and made them popular, human, but inviolable.
From A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance With special reference to the influence of Italy in the formation and development of modern classicism by Joel Elias Spingarn
That last attraction might sound like a waste of space, a frivolous, vulgarizing touch.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2021
The original film was made with brazenly mercantile yet artistically sound intentions, and, despite its vulgarizing touches, it’s a crudely effective story about tradition and modernity, misogyny and resistance.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 1, 2019
Or Davy Crockett movies for vulgarizing Tennessee history -- and sentimentalizing bears.
From Time Magazine Archive
Several have done so, simultaneously vulgarizing the past and present.
From Time Magazine Archive
The little church, thanks to the taste of the present pastor and the economical proclivities of past generations, had escaped the vulgarizing influence of "a good coat of paint."
From Jessamine A Novel by Marion Harland
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