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:
Carpenter plucks Cricket from arts college and its meaningless pontificating to his “atelier in the corn,” a ramshackle Victorian where Cricket learns how to transmute what he sees with color and light.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 8, 2026
The rosary presupposes our boredom, propensity to distraction, and impatience with dull routine and attempts to transmute these failings into the virtues of faith, hope and charity.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 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
Darwin’s question was macroscopic: How do organisms transmute information about their features over a thousand generations?
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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
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
Lunenfeld writes that an “alchemical map of a Los Angeles reimagined transmutes the elements, diagraming a connectionist platzgeist.”
From New York Times ● Aug. 11, 2020
In a way it transmutes our very real and ongoing anxiety and sense of helplessness into something we can put eyes on, a vicarious and safely distant fantasy of disorder and detonation.
From Salon ● May 4, 2020
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives.
From Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature by John Bartlett
“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
In Heaney’s poetry the personal is always transmuted by a larger vision.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 21, 2025
Yet Boggs makes a strong case for these books as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 18, 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
They provided precise ionization data, spelled out their theory on how positrons emitted by the bombarded atoms transmuted into gamma rays, and carefully avoided any speculation about the significance of the new phenomenon.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
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
What physicists 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
The collection showcased an intricate blend of masculine and feminine, transmuting the high-end tailoring traditions of British menswear with haute couture fabrications, harking back to Dior’s womenswear roots.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 23, 2023
The musical, even at this somewhat wobbly preliminary stage, holds onto the gold of Hinton’s novel, transmuting it imperfectly yet courageously into hypnotic theater.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 7, 2023
By transmuting common uranium into a fissionable product that could be extracted chemically, Seaborg calculated, they could increase the supply of raw material available for a bomb by a hundredfold.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
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.
