propitiate
/ˌpɹəˈpɪʃieɪt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.53 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To conciliate, appease, or make peace with someone, particularly a god or spirit.
Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "Let fierce Achilles, dreadful in his rage, The god propitiate, and the pest assuage."
- "But polite and politic it is, to propitiate your hostess."
- "[H]e heard . . . one of the soldiers singing as he cleaned his rifle—the men always sang over this business, as if to propitiate the gun god."
- "The androgynous creative deity was best supplicated or propitiated by offerings concerned with the pleasures of the flesh. In such circumstances, to the worshipper as to the god, licentiousness was not a sin: on the contrary, it was a duty."
- "By saying unequivocally that conscription is not an option, the Bush administration and the Rumsfeld Pentagon, while propitiating the ghost of Vietnam, are also profiting from the success of the all-volunteer military."
- "But what was that compared to the pleasure of gazing on him, and listening to his words of pity or of praise! to witnessing the sparkling of his eyes when he gazed on his boy, and sought, by every possible medium, to coax him to his arms, a task not to be achieved in a moment; or in listening to that praise of Lord Allerton, which was likely to propitiate Mary in his favour!"
Etymology
From Latin propitiāt-, the past participial stem of propitiāre (“make favourable”), from propitius (“favourable, gracious”).
Origin
- Source language: Latin