transmute
Americanverb (used with or without object)
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transmutes,
present (3rd person singular)
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transmuted,
past participle, past
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transmuting
present participle
verb
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to change the form, character, or substance of
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to alter (an element, metal, etc) by alchemy
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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transmutabilitynoun
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transmutablenessnoun
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transmuternoun
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untransmutabilitynoun
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untransmutablenessnoun
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transmutableadjective
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untransmutableadjective
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untransmutedadjective
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transmutablyadverb
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untransmutablyadverb
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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transmutesimple
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transmutessimple
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have transmutedperfect
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has transmutedperfect
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am transmutingprogressive
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are transmutingprogressive
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is transmutingprogressive
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have been transmutingperfect progressive
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has been transmutingperfect progressive
Past
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transmutedsimple
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had transmutedperfect
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was transmutingprogressive
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were transmutingprogressive
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had been transmutingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of transmute
1400–50; late Middle English < Latin trānsmūtāre to shift, equivalent to trāns- trans- + mūtāre to change.
Explanation
Transmute is a verb meaning to change in appearance or form. For example, magical creatures can transmute into other beings. When you're fighting a wizard, don’t be surprised if he transmutes into a terrifying dragon. More realistically, you, too, can transmute your appearance — by dying your hair, piercing your nose, or changing your style of dress. Transmute often describes physical change — like when alchemists tried to transmute lead into gold — but it can also be used more figuratively to describe anything that's transformed. For example, you might transmute your sketchy memories of growing up in Boston into the Great American Novel.
Vocabulary lists containing transmute
American Gods
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The Good Earth
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The Left Hand of Darkness
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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:
The spider’s ability to transmute our human apprehensions still holds true.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026
Astrologers consult a national zodiac, palm readers ring pagodas, would-be alchemists attempt to transmute mercury into gold and SIM card companies advertise dial-a-diviners.
From Barron's ● Dec. 21, 2025
"What causes something to be insulating, conducting or magnetic? Can we transmute something into a different state?"
From Science Daily ● Nov. 17, 2025
According to Israel's Basic Law, the president "has the power to pardon criminals and reduce or transmute their sentence".
From BBC ● Nov. 12, 2025
It was his odd blindness, I think, to all problems of a personal nature which made him able at the end to transmute even Bunny’s highly substantive troubles into spiritual ones.
From "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt
According to Slant magazine, the writer-director’s flair for “go-for-broke zaniness transmutes what might otherwise have been a lump of self-indulgent cliches into gold.”
From Washington Post ● Feb. 23, 2022
Finally, she transmutes into a virus — a female bug in a hardwired social system.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 10, 2021
But when consumed raw, sprinkled with a little salt and pepper, a bitter alchemy transmutes its heat into an experience so intense that a single bite contains an entire sensory universe.
From New York Times ● Aug. 24, 2021
Like a sleazy alchemist, Hill transmutes shoestring budgets into cinematic gold, melting down and reshaping scrap metal into distinctive, often beautiful art.
From The Guardian ● Sep. 16, 2020
This newspaper instinct, which is developed by training but which one must possess in large measure before he can be successful in journalism, seizes upon everything and transmutes it into "copy" for the printer.
From The Critic in the Orient by George Hamlin Fitch
“Another Dimension” is his answer to the years of rejection, pain and incandescent ire, but transmuted into a vibrant, avant-garde, genre-defying gaping wound found within 11 tight tracks.
From Salon ● Jun. 5, 2026
As a Black woman who grew up in the segregated South, she transmuted the prejudice her community faced into striking scenes of human connection, many of them sketched from memory and some rendered as linocuts.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 23, 2026
In Heaney’s poetry the personal is always transmuted by a larger vision.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 21, 2025
They’re not the products of someone who has digested and transmuted her experience of those older artists into an original idiom, one that generates its own internal heat rather than depending on a borrowed glow.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 27, 2023
Thus in 1660 Boyle describes one experiment ‘as a plausible, though not demonstrative proof, that Water may be transmuted into Air’.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
The idea of transmuting black rock into useful products was born out of similar energy-security anxieties a century ago.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 30, 2026
“In this first half, it’s very much about exploring all the different sort of versions and avenues of yourself as you’re growing and changing and transmuting into something else,” she says.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 20, 2023
What Soddy and Rutherford realized was that nature itself is an alchemist, "transmuting" materials into other types of materials through the spontaneous process of radioactive decay.
From Salon ● Aug. 12, 2023
Maybe the consolation comes from transmuting complex emotions and weighty observations into objects that are boldly and beautifully precise.
From New York Times ● Jan. 27, 2021
For the alchemists, including Boyle and Newton, the fundamental enterprise was one of transmuting one substance into another.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
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.
