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
But broken columns, boxed poems and spots of color and photographs enhance rather than vulgarize.
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
They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which they had no appreciation whatever,—and which therefore only helped to vulgarize them.
From The Crest-Wave of Evolution A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19 by Kenneth Morris
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
Ninotchka’s personhood is diminished, even as the composer’s work is vulgarized.
From New York Times ● Aug. 19, 2016
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
And she became somewhat vulgarized in her bearing.
From The Lost Girl by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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
Have they not already ruined the high aristocracy of thought in vulgarizing education?
From Time Magazine Archive
Allen Tate dismissed Yevtushenko as "a ham actor," whose performances are a "vulgarizing of poetry."
From Time Magazine Archive
Intemperance in the use of language is as much to be censured as intemperance in anything else; like intemperance in other things, its effect is vulgarizing.
From The Verbalist A Manual Devoted to Brief Discussions of the Right and the Wrong Use of Words and to Some Other Matters of Interest to Those Who Would Speak and Write with Propriety. by Thomas Embly Osmun
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.
