stultifying

Verb

stultify (third-person singular simple present stultifies, present participle stultifying, simple past and past participle stultified)

1. (transitive) To stunt, inhibit (progress, ideas, etc.) or make dull and uninteresting, especially through routine that is overly restrictive or limiting.
   • Bureaucracy and over-regulation have stultified the economy.

   Synonyms:

   inhibit, impair, dull

2. (dated, transitive) To make useless or worthless.
   • His business plan was stultified by new technologies.
3. (dated, transitive) To cause to appear foolish; to deprive of strength; to stupefy.
   • The politicians continued to stultify themselves.

   Synonyms:

   humiliate

4. (archaic, transitive) To prove to be of unsound mind or demonstrate someone's incompetence.
   • And although, as hath been observed, according to the strict rules of law no person is allows to stultify himself, yet it seems that even at law the contracts of idiots and lunaticks, after office found, and the party legally commited, are void […]1798, Mathew Bacon, “Idiots and Lunaticks”, in Sir Henry Gwillim, editor, A New Abridgment of the Law, volume 3, London: Alexander Strahan, →OCLC, page 539