English

Verb

vitiate ‎(third-person singular simple present vitiates, present participle vitiating, simple past and past participle vitiated)

1. (transitive) to spoil, make faulty; to reduce the value, quality, or effectiveness of something
   • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 12

     There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.

   • 1997: ‘Mr Rose,’ says the Physician, ‘this man was brought to us from Russia. Precisely such a case of vitiated judgment as I describe at length in my Treatise on Madness. Mayhap you have read it?’ — Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain
2. (transitive) to debase or morally corrupt
   • 1890, Leo Tolstoy, The Slavery of Our Times

     The robber does not intentionally vitiate people, but the governments, to accomplish their ends, vitiate whole generations from childhood to manhood with false religions and patriotic instruction.

3. (transitive, archaic) to violate, to rape
   • 1965: ‘Crush the cockatrice,’ he groaned, from his death-cell. ‘I am dead in law’ – but of the girl he denied that he had ‘attempted to vitiate her at Nine years old’; for ‘upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done’. — John Fowles, The Magus
4. (transitive) to make something ineffective, to invalidate
   • 1734, William Stukeley, Of the Gout, page 78:

     ...all the hinges of the animal frame are subverted, every animal function is vitiated; the carcass retains but just life enough to make it capable of suffering.

Related terms

• vice
• vicious
• vitiation

Translations

Latin

Verb

vitiāte

1. first-person plural present active imperative of vitiō