Pronounced: meh-tuh-GRAHB-uh-lize, verb
Notes: This sounds like a made-up word (but it isn’t)
Yesterday’s word
The word transmogrify means “to change of alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect. As I noted yesterday, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes created a ‘transmogrifier’ – it was a cardboard box on which he put wrote what he wanted to transmogrify himself into.
Background
Well, the background for this word is unclear: the prefix trans- means “across” or “beyond”, but the rest of it is not known.
First usage
The word showed up in the mid-1600s. As an interesting side note, one of the earliest users of this word was England’s first female professional writers (Aphra Behn).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 