villanize

English

Verb

villanize (third-person singular simple present villanizes, present participle villanizing, simple past and past participle villanized)

1. (transitive) To make vile; to debase; to degrade; to revile.
   • 1700, John Dryden, The Wife of Bath:

     Were virtue by descent, a noble name
     Could never villanize his father's fame.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “villanize”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)