• Today's Word

Stultify

🔊 Listen to the word Stultify

STUL-tih-fy

Definition

(verb) To cause someone or something to appear foolish or absurd; to cause to lose enthusiasm or initiative through tedium or restrictive routine

Example

Years of mindless data entry had stultified what was once one of the sharpest minds in the department.

Word Origin

Stultify derives from the Latin stultus (“foolish”) + facere (“to make”) — literally “to make foolish.” It entered English in the 18th century first as a legal term, describing the act of making oneself appear incompetent in order to avoid legal responsibility, before broadening to its modern sense of dulling or deadening the mind through boredom or oppressive routine.

Fun Fact

The legal origin of stultify is one of the stranger chapters in English legal history. In early common law, a person could “plead stultification” — essentially arguing that they were too mentally incompetent to be held to a contract or obligation. The catch was that making this plea also meant publicly declaring oneself a fool, which courts found so inherently contradictory and self-defeating that the plea was eventually abolished. The broader modern meaning — to deaden or suppress through tedium — retains that original flavor of something being made smaller and more foolish than it ought to be.