vitiate

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.
   • The least admixture of a lie, -- for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, -- will instantly vitiate the effect.1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson, An Address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday evening, 15 July, 1838
   • Such diversion as Podson could extort from his isolation was soon vitiated by repetition. He surfed. He sun-baked - with discretion till his skin had peeled and given him a harder cuticle.1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 90

   Synonyms:

   mess up, ruin, degrade, devalue, ball up, blight, bumble, botch, bugger up, bungle

2. (transitive) To debase or morally corrupt.
   • Dissolute and vitiated alike, they confided in, and ever acted in mutual concert with each other's plans, according to the deep subtleties of their reasonings, which linked them together by some secret spell.1838, [Letitia Elizabeth] Landon (indicated as editor), chapter III, in Duty and Inclination: […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 25
   • There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 12, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

   Synonyms:

   immoralize, lead astray, warp, adulterate, corrupt, debauch, demoralize, detort, file, pervert

3. (archaic, transitive) To violate, to rape.
   • ‘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’.1965, John Fowles, The Magus

   Synonyms:

   abuse, outrage, viole, constuprate, defile, defoul, dishonour, force, misuse, oppress

4. (transitive) To make something ineffective, to invalidate.
   • […]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.1734, William Stukeley, Of the Gout, page 78
   • He went over his canvases with disgust and anger, unable to see virtue in any one of them. Even his sacred Oyster Girl went back on him. The creature of a vitiated æstheticism, he could only suppose that conceit had played an abominable trick on his eyesight.1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 133

   Synonyms:

   annul, nullify, void, abrogate, belay, cancel, cease, cross out, desist, forbid