transmute
/tranzˈmjuːt
/ /trɑːnzˈmjuːt/ /transˈmjuːt/ /trɑːnsˈmjuːt/verb
1Change in form, nature, or substance: [with object]: the raw material of his experience was transmuted into stories [no object]: the discovery that elements can transmute by radioactivity...
- Like so many other beauty products, styling treatments have come a long, long way: 20 years ago there were products that, when dry, transmuted into white flakes of dandruff.
- We see, here, a politics of masculinity, its currency that of resentment transmuted into exaggerated self-assertion.
- There is Latin itself, which ultimately failed to outlive the imperium and which slowly transmuted into the vernacular Romance languages.
1.1 [with object] Subject (base metals) to alchemical transmutation: the quest to transmute lead into gold...
- Like the Stone, the Elixir could transmute base metals to gold.
- Alchemists never transmuted metals, never found a panacea, and never discovered the fountain of youth.
- The elixir is the Philosopher's Stone, the object which will transmute base metals into silver and gold, but also has the power of restoring health, curing all diseases.
Derivatives
transmutability
/ noun ...- A similar transmutability of energy into information, and vice versa, although somewhat more subtle, may well drive 21st Century science and many of its applications.
- As such, even the his claim to have renounced the power of alchemy is still locked into its rhetorical presumption of the transmutability of self and world.
- These questions point to the fluidity and transmutability of the questions we deal with as we re-imagine, re-read, re-tell and re-write the human record.
transmutable
/ adjective ...- It is here, around discourses to do with the transmutable body of Christ, that the Cartesian method becomes most apparent within her writing and in exchanges with her spiritual director.
- Of course, making crude and speculative drawings of atoms proves nothing, but it encourages the belief that elements are not transmutable but irrevocably different from one another.
- His work is in some ways truer to the nature of film than the more materialist British work, in that film color is itself somewhat arbitrary and transmutable.
transmutative
- By 1913 most of the gold had disappeared, but the transmutative effect of the rush survived.
- Echinacea Purpurea assists initiates in releasing cellular trauma during the transmutative process of ascension.
- The works in this exhibition explore the space of fantasy as an ongoing process of transmutative imaginings.
transmuter
- It's full of illusionists and transmuters, and you're worried about hair color?
- What, is he one of those transmuters who looks like something from a horror movie?
- We had a transmuter change me from a housecat to a panther, and telekinesis became easier, because my mass was greater.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin transmutare, from trans- 'across' + mutare 'to change'.