BOWDLERISE
verb | BOHD-ler-ise
What It Means
In its strictest sense, to bowdlerise a book, manuscript, etc. is to modify it by editing so that nothing judged to be morally harmful or offensive remains. More broadly, bowdlerise means “to modify by abridging, simplifying, or distorting in style or content.”
// The publisher’s decision to bowdlerise the classic novel was met with mixed reactions.
Examples of BOWDLERISE
“Right from the beginning, Walt Disney Animation Studios leaned heavily on existing books and stories for inspiration, starting with its first feature, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While this has resulted in some truly wonderful movies, the studio’s tendency to make major changes to its source material—toning down the original stories’ dark or violent content, and generally softening the edges—has also been apparent from the start. It’s such a predictable part of the Disney process that the neologism ‘Disneyfication’ has become a generic term for bowdlerizing a story into a tame kid-friendly version.” — Chris Wheatley, Polygon.com, 20 June 2023
Did You Know?
In 1807, a new edition of the works of William Shakespeare hit the scene in England. Titled The Family Shakespeare, the collection of 20 of the Bard’s plays in four volumes was at first anonymously edited, and promised in its preface to “remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious or virtuous mind.” Though the sanitised project later became a public sensation (and a source of literary derision) after its expanded, ten-volume second edition was published in 1818 and credited solely to physician Thomas Bowdler, the original expurgation was in fact the work of his older sister Henrietta Maria “Harriet” Bowdler, an accomplished editor and author. Within a year of the younger Bowdler’s death in 1825, bowdlerise had come to refer to cutting out the dirty bits of other books and texts—testimony not only to the impact of his eye for impropriety, but to those of his sister Harriet as well, though her efforts were obscured by history, if not technically bowdlerised.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
