transmogrify

Evolution has similarly purloined existing features and modified them, using great thrift, for example, to transmogrify a piece of jaw into an ear or to transform a leg into a wing.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 26, 2025

It’s likely in the middle of that process now, and could transmogrify itself into a star in as little as 200,000 years.

From Scientific American ● Apr. 24, 2023

The concluding fire-and-brimstone fireworks of “Vingt Regards” transmogrify that turmoil of liberation into a transcendental visitation of bliss in the mystic beyond.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 23, 2020

What if we allow flowers to transmogrify into a sculptural medium like clay or marble or steel, unique in their ephemerality but ultimately just another organic formation?

From New York Times ● Mar. 4, 2020

Jonathan was for an instant paralysed by our impudence; but he yawed and let drive his whole broadside; and fearfully did it transmogrify us.

From The World's Greatest Books — Volume 07 — Fiction by Mee, Arthur

The air around me was sour and stale, transmogrified by a mass of sweating bodies.

From Salon ● Aug. 17, 2024

Like other climate denial claims, the urban planning concept transmogrified in the depths of the internet.

From Scientific American ● Jul. 19, 2023

Hideously transmogrified, they struggle upstream past the banks of Pacific Northwest lakes, rivers and streams in an intricate and terrifying water ballet.

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 27, 2022

What Churchill “has come to represent,” they say, “has transmogrified into a deeper, more troubling and darker phenomenon in which the past weighs unforgivingly on the present.”

From New York Times ● Oct. 13, 2020

Love had transmogrified him into a romantic idiot, and they drove him away back into the bedroom to wrangle with his girl over Captain Black.

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller

The main specialties of gender-affirming care — endocrinology and plastic surgery — were founded in the early 1900s, not as a means of transmogrifying gender but rather as tools for reifying it.

From New York Times ● May 10, 2022

Adrien Merigeau’s fluidly surreal French dazzler “Genius Loci,” meanwhile, finds a solitary young woman’s restlessness about night in the city answered by the ceaseless transmogrifying of her surroundings, even herself.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 1, 2021

This time the player is Detective Sebastian Castellanos a troubled detective who must search for his lost daughter in a weird, transmogrifying town.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 15, 2017

Guitar Hero reanimated the music video game genre when it launched in 2005, magically transmogrifying players into bona fide fret-shredding, tremolo-slapping Rock Gods.

From Time ● Aug. 23, 2016

Verbosity.—This is the power of writing two columns in answer to a three-line paragraph—of twisting, turning, transmogrifying, dissecting, kicking, cuffing, illustrating, turning inside out, and outside in again the aforesaid paragraph.

From Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 32, November 5, 1870 by Various