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
The waves of vulgarity this picture gave off made me have the strong instinct that he was going to vulgarize the office of the presidency.
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
To “paint” the subject merely to make it more real, is only to insult the imaginative power and to vulgarize the whole.
From The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) by John Ruskin
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
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
In a cri de coeur written in retrospect, the Boston architect Rodolfo Machado lamented that the postmodernist critique of Modernism had been misunderstood and vulgarized in kitschy banalities built across the country.
From New York Times ● Aug. 21, 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
So patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender as a climate.
From A Short History of England by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
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
Several have done so, simultaneously vulgarizing the past and present.
From Time Magazine Archive
Allen Tate dismissed Yevtushenko as "a ham actor," whose performances are a "vulgarizing of poetry."
From Time Magazine Archive
With what truthful tenderness does such a writer depict nature!—how different is his treatment from the spasmodic, straining, extravagant, vulgarizing efforts of the play-wright!
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 373, November 1846 by Various
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