Question

expurgate In those years, high-school English classes only used expurgated editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. expurgate*

Accepted Answer

To cleanse of something morally harmful or offensive; to remove objectionable parts from. Expurgation has a long and questionable history. Perhaps history's most famous expurgator, or censor, was the English editor Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published the Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of Shakespeare's plays that omitted or changed any passages that, in Bowdler's opinion, couldn't decently be read aloud in a family. As a result, the term bowdlerize is now a synonym of expurgate

word	expurgate
definition	To cleanse of something morally harmful or offensive; to remove objectionable parts from.
eg_sentence	In those years, high-school English classes only used expurgated editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
explanation	Expurgation has a long and questionable history. Perhaps history's most famous expurgator, or censor, was the English editor Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published the Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of Shakespeare's plays that omitted or changed any passages that, in Bowdler's opinion, couldn't decently be read aloud in a family. As a result, the term bowdlerize is now a synonym of expurgate
IPA	expurgate*

Expurgate English Expurgated Cleanse Morally Harmful Offensive Remove