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

“That a special purpose grand jury cannot issue an indictment does not diminish the criminal nature of its work or somehow transmogrify that criminal investigation into a civil one,” Judge McBurney wrote.

From New York Times ● Oct. 8, 2022

The play is treated as though it might at any moment transmogrify into a musical.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 2019

Jonathan was for an instant paralysed by our impudence; but just as we were getting before the wind, he yawed, and let drive his whole broadside; and fearfully did it transmogrify us.

From Tom Cringle's Log by Michael Scott

Consequently, construction delays mounted, all transmogrified into change orders.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2026

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

From Scientific American ● Jul. 19, 2023

Maybe before you saw the package in Trader Joe's you assumed it might mean cheese on top of bread, or bread stuffed with cheese, or maybe bread that has been somehow transmogrified into cheese.

From Salon ● Feb. 7, 2022

Also, you can bet your booty Bond has never, and will never, ever, be transmogrified into a — wait for it — pigeon.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 23, 2019

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

With his endpaper paintings, Bradford demonstrated a talent for transmogrifying everyday objects by layering, sanding, gouging, scraping and tearing until they obliquely reflected his peculiar perspective on the world.

From New York Times ● Apr. 19, 2023

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

One of its greatest delights is King’s extended cameo as an unlucky hillbilly transmogrifying into a mossy mutant, an appropriate metaphor for his fecund imagination.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 22, 2019

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