stultify

He puts the yawn into stultify, the stupefy into catatonia, stone-facedly delivering the exact same chords, licks, and nasal delivery for over three decades over a backbeat that would have lost the Boer War.

From Salon ● Jul. 11, 2012

But after a while Mr. Yeston’s tuneful feast begins to satiate and eventually stultify, and by the evening’s end it’s as if you’d eaten a whole buffet of pastry.

From New York Times ● Jul. 22, 2011

So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity? Cities, after all, need people out on the sidewalks.

From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2011

The reason is the feeling in jazz that if you print something, if you write down the notes, you will stultify the music.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 12, 2010

Each felt too strongly on these subjects to give way, and thereby stultify his or her convictions.

From Victor Hugo: His Life and Works by Smith, G. Barnett

Gems include a rant on critics, the assertion that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing and how writing helped alleviate his stultified misery after a near-death car accident.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 14, 2025

All these lessons leave me stultified; The hours in the day just drag along — I think they’ve multiplied!

From Washington Post ● Apr. 30, 2020

The stultified senators should distract themselves with dice cricket, a game beloved by indoorsy British children.

From Slate ● Jan. 23, 2020

But the fact that so many singers of her stature hew to the standard repertory suggests how stultified the world of opera has become since the days when Puccini’s operas took the world by storm.

From New York Times ● Jan. 9, 2020

This theory represents mercy as always stultified until Christ satisfied justice.

From The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 by Walker, Aaron

For Jews, the stultifying fact to be faced is that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 21, 2025

There have always been those who found the place, with its pretentious airs, dilatory pacing and stultifying rules of order, a frustrating environment to work in, much less thrive.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 18, 2025

In reality, the most powerful force in the modern American city is the stultifying status quo.

From Slate ● Sep. 16, 2024

In Lebanon, the stultifying heat of summer is overlaid by a layer of anxiety.

From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2024

I worked in a Wall Street mailroom and finally found a job in the post office from which I was fired because I could no longer stand the stultifying work.

From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers