chameleonize

Verb

chameleonize (third-person singular simple present chameleonizes, present participle chameleonizing, simple past and past participle chameleonized)

1. (intransitive) To change colour or turn various colours; to be transformed (to suit changing circumstances).
   • King by your leaue, for in your kingſhippe I muſt leaue you, and repeate how from white to redde you camelionized.1599, [Thomas] Nashe, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, […], London: […] [Thomas Judson and Valentine Simmes] for N[icholas] L[ing] and C[uthbert] B[urby] […], →OCLC, page 51
   • I care nothing for the plaudits of the populace. I’m ambitious, in a way; but when that way requires me to leave the people—the things—that I love, then ambition chameleonizes and I become ambitious antithetically.1909, Porter Emerson Browne, chapter 13, in A Fool There Was, New York: The H.K. Fly Company, page 100
2. (transitive) To cause to change colour or turn various colours; to transform (to suit changing circumstances).
   • Such a difference of opinion is passed over with a shrug of the shoulder, for some “regulars” practise empirically (clinically), and others scientifically. The “majority” and “Medical Ethics” contend that every practitioner shall sail under the colors he or she may select, but not use one which may...1878, “Homœopathy and Exclusiveness,” Letter to the editor, Medical Record, 28 September, 1878, p. 257
   • The dogmatism of youth was perfected in the criticism of manhood, and revealed in the ethical exotericism of old age. Yet, with all the multifarious content of his thinking, and the chameleonized forms it was led to assume, there runs through it all a common trait.1897, Edward Franklin Buchner, A Study of Kant’s Psychology with Reference to The Critical Philosophy, Psychological Review, New York: Macmillan, Monograph Supplement, No. 4, January, 1897, Chapter...
3. (reflexive) To transform oneself, as if changing colour like a chameleon.
   • […] after [reading] Virgil and Dante […] in an atmosphere trembling with eternal lamentations and on a soil drenched with unceasing showers of tears all the morning, every evening, lately, I am in a ball-room where flourishes a whip-syllabub of life, as if under our feet yawned no such realities....1841, Fanny Appleton Longfellow, Letter to Isaac Appleton Jewett dated 25 January, 1841, in Edward Wagenknecht (ed.), Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow, New...
   • If an intelligent stranger desired to discover the root of our national difficulties, he would naturally inquire into the history, character, and action of the political parties into which our people have been divided. […] he would learn the history of a party of perpetual opposition, constantly...1864, George Bliss, “Causes of the War,” Speech delivered in the House of Representatives, Washington, DC: Constitutional Union Office, pp. 3-4