transmogrify
Americanverb (used with object)
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of transmogrify
1650–60; earlier also transmigrify, transmography; apparently a pseudo-Latinism with transfigure or transmigrate + -ify
Explanation
You've seen something transmogrify, or transform completely, if you've ever watched the process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Use the verb transmogrify when a person or thing changes in a way that surprises you. A fairy tale frog transmogrifies into a prince in one well-known story, and a tomboy might be said to transmogrify when she puts on a frilly dress to be a flower girl in a wedding. The origin of transmogrify isn't clear, although one theory is that it was a mistake made long ago, when someone meant to say transmigrate, or "pass into another body after death."
Vocabulary lists containing transmogrify
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Grendel
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"Simon's Saga," Vocabulary from Episode 19
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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:
Evolution has similarly purloined existing features and modified them, using great thrift, for example, to transmogrify a piece of jaw into an ear or to transform a leg into a wing.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 26, 2025
It’s likely in the middle of that process now, and could transmogrify itself into a star in as little as 200,000 years.
From Scientific American ● Apr. 24, 2023
What if we allow flowers to transmogrify into a sculptural medium like clay or marble or steel, unique in their ephemerality but ultimately just another organic formation?
From New York Times ● Mar. 4, 2020
The play is treated as though it might at any moment transmogrify into a musical.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 2019
S. S. Schmucker's ambition was to transmogrify the Lutheran Church into an essentially unionistic Reformed body.
From American Lutheranism Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod by Bente, F. (Friedrich)
Like other climate denial claims, the urban planning concept transmogrified in the depths of the internet.
From Scientific American ● Jul. 19, 2023
Coupled with marketable if less visible engineering advances, the campaign transmogrified the cookie-cutter low-cost automobile that Hitler commissioned as “the people’s car” in the 1930s into the American counterculture’s adorable “Love Bug.”
From New York Times ● Jan. 18, 2023
Maybe before you saw the package in Trader Joe's you assumed it might mean cheese on top of bread, or bread stuffed with cheese, or maybe bread that has been somehow transmogrified into cheese.
From Salon ● Feb. 7, 2022
But it could "rapidly be transmogrified into an ideological orthodoxy".
From BBC ● May 12, 2020
Love had transmogrified him into a romantic idiot, and they drove him away back into the bedroom to wrangle with his girl over Captain Black.
From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
According to cast member Kyle Sullivan, “There was this weird dynamic where they were taking something that exists in an adult context, like ‘Fear Factor,’ and transmogrifying it for kids.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 13, 2024
The main specialties of gender-affirming care — endocrinology and plastic surgery — were founded in the early 1900s, not as a means of transmogrifying gender but rather as tools for reifying it.
From New York Times ● May 10, 2022
Guitar Hero reanimated the music video game genre when it launched in 2005, magically transmogrifying players into bona fide fret-shredding, tremolo-slapping Rock Gods.
From Time ● Aug. 23, 2016
“Thank you for speaking, and speaking from your heart,” Cruz said warmly before transmogrifying into his more lawyerly self.
From Slate ● Jul. 21, 2016
Mrs. K. is an excellent hand at transmogrifying things, and in a large family such articles never come amiss.”
From Flora Lyndsay or, Passages in an Eventful Life by Moodie, Susanna
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.
