transfigure
Americanverb
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to change or cause to change in appearance
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to become or cause to become more exalted
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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transfiguresimple
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transfiguressimple
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have transfiguredperfect
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has transfiguredperfect
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am transfiguringprogressive
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are transfiguringprogressive
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is transfiguringprogressive
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have been transfiguringperfect progressive
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has been transfiguringperfect progressive
Past
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transfiguredsimple
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had transfiguredperfect
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was transfiguringprogressive
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were transfiguringprogressive
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had been transfiguringperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of transfigure
1250–1300; Middle English transfiguren < Latin trānsfigūrāre to change in shape. See trans-, figure
Explanation
To transfigure is to change or alter something, often so that it becomes even more amazing or beautiful. That colorful mural you painted really transfigures your bedroom! Transfigure has a Latin root, transfigurare, "change the shape of." While its meaning is similar to transform, there's usually an additional sense of "make better" in transfigure. When you come home dirty and tired after a camping trip, a hot shower and clean clothes will transfigure you. And adding grated cheese, chopped basil, and a drizzle of good olive oil can transfigure a simple dish of pasta.
Vocabulary lists containing transfigure
The Pearl
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
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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:
Two of the participants transfigure their own work.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 13, 2023
These phenomena transfigure copyrights, patents, and trademarks into subjects of everyday importance.
From Salon ● Jun. 4, 2022
These are process-driven stories that actively engage, and transfigure, the moment that spawns them.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 22, 2021
If you aren’t aware that Susanna Kaysen published an influential memoir called Girl, Interrupted in 1999, the phrase is puzzling, since Loose Girl doesn’t so much promise to interrupt the truth as to transfigure it.
From Slate ● Nov. 30, 2017
It kept crackling and sparking at odd moments, and every time Ron tried to transfigure his beetle it engulfed him in thick gray smoke that smelled of rotten eggs.
From "Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets" by J. K. Rowling
Art transfigures life but, for every great work of art, there are casualties.
From New York Times ● Feb. 12, 2024
What radiates from Eika’s gritty magical realism is ambient but potent: a grief so profound that it transfigures, a loneliness so abject that it fractures perception.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 19, 2021
All great art is consoling because it transfigures our ordinary feelings into something bigger.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 11, 2016
It gets to the very essence of movie-going and transfigures the concept.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 25, 2016
At one time the man is completely hidden by the myth and becomes absolutely legendary; again, he assumes only an aureole that transfigures him.
From Essay on the Creative Imagination by Albert Heyem Nachmen Baron
In imagining her disturbed perceptions, the novel shows the old dog’s circumscribed world transfigured by long forgotten yearnings and powerfully altered understandings.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 29, 2026
His inauguration was a ritual of devotion, an arena where the less powerful — which means practically everybody — was transfigured by his presence.
From Salon ● Jan. 31, 2025
The following year, he changed his own name to Akhenaten, meaning “the transfigured spirit of the solar orb,” and moved himself and his entire family to the new city.
From Textbooks ● Apr. 19, 2023
In the hands of director Alison Moritz and choreographer Hope Boykin, “Mass” felt less transfigured than restored: its details clarified, its highlights polished, its angles more keenly lit.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 16, 2022
He seemed almost to be transfigured by the excitement of his thoughts.
From "The BFG" by Roald Dahl
The result was, if not a religious experience, then a spiritually transfiguring one.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 31, 2025
Still, the speed at which generative AI appears to be capable of transfiguring workplaces — seemingly overnight — is dizzying, especially relative to prior technological breakthroughs.
From Seattle Times ● May 12, 2023
I have no transfiguring powers and nothing yet to mourn.
From New York Times ● Mar. 29, 2022
But, as the linguist Gretchen McCulloch reveals in “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” her effervescent study of how the digital world is transfiguring English, informal writing is relatively new.
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 26, 2019
As artists will, they stole everything they could, transfiguring the images further.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
