propitiate

Before he was reinstated, the Anderson School’s Faculty Executive Committee tried to propitiate the mob by announcing itself “saddened” by Klein’s “troubling conduct.”

From Washington Post ● Oct. 8, 2021

I suspect that Oskar probably still believes that it was just something in my nature: that somebody needed to be sacrificed on the altar on the way to propitiate whatever, and that that was him.

From Slate ● Jun. 28, 2016

Was it just to tell the date or propitiate some mountain deity?

From The Guardian ● Feb. 8, 2013

Mr. Talbott, who won the first Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award for a new play with “The Submission,” understands the conflicting urges to propitiate and attack that spring from the insecurities of a life in the theater.

From New York Times ● Sep. 28, 2011

Especially I felt this when I made any attempt to propitiate him.

From "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë

And nothing so effectually as an evening bath, as my experience testifies, cures fatigue and propitiates to dreamless slumber.

From Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2 by Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Ages, empires, civilisations pass, and leave some members even of educated mankind still, in certain points, on the level of the savage who propitiates with gifts, or addresses with prayers, the spirits of the dead.

From Cock Lane and Common-Sense by Lang, Andrew

Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him, and imitation is the perfection of divine service.

From Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII by Maclaren, Alexander

The Indian yields to it a sort of worship, propitiates it with offerings of tobacco, thanks it in prosperity, and upbraids it in disaster.

From The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century by Parkman, Francis

They believe that shaving the head of the dead propitiates the deities in their favour.

From Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs by Silver, Jacob Mortimer Wier

True to form, Iranians haven't been propitiated by such gestures.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

I promise I won't let our multithreaded discussion veer too far down the red carpet, but the Oscars are the Oscars; their vestal fires burn, their gods must be propitiated.

From Slate ● Jan. 16, 2014

He propitiated many of Germany's other former enemies by dropping to his knees in front of a memorial to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto.

From Time Magazine Archive

For 700 years the Romans propitiated a special god of stem rust, Robigo.

From Time Magazine Archive

The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

He suggests that they may have perceived the cave walls as a kind of membrane between their world and the spirits, and thus created their paintings as a means of propitiating them.

From The Guardian ● May 23, 2020

On this teacher’s advice, the Dalai Lama had himself been propitiating this dangerous spirit – along with innumerable other esoteric rituals – as part of his daily four hours of meditation and spiritual exercise.

From Newsweek

Yet the chief of them all and his immediate disciples founded a hermitage in the wilderness, where they devoted themselves to propitiating the wrath of God.

From A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages; volume II by Lea, Henry Charles

A timber merchant at Calicut in Malabar is said to have spent more than a thousand rupees in propitiating the spirit of a deceased Brāhman under the following circumstances.

From Omens and Superstitions of Southern India by Thurston, Edgar

Then his aching disappointment revealed to him that, in spite of his anger, he had been expecting a propitiating note, and perhaps a renewal of her invitation to dinner.

From Playing With Fire by Barr, Amelia Edith Huddleston