VITIATE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Vitiate

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verb

Vitiate v. t. (past & past part. vitiated; pres. part. vitiating) (Written also viciate)

To make vicious, faulty, or imperfect; to render defective; to injure the substance or qualities of; to impair; to contaminate; to spoil; as, exaggeration vitiates a style of writing; sewer gas vitiates the air. "A will vitiated and growth out of love with the truth disposes the understanding to error and delusion." "Without care it may be used to vitiate our minds." "This undistinguishing complaisance will vitiate the taste of readers."

To cause to fail of effect, either wholly or in part; to make void; to destroy, as the validity or binding force of an instrument or transaction; to annul; as, any undue influence exerted on a jury vitiates their verdict; fraud vitiates a contract.

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Etymology of 'Vitiate'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Vitiate" Quotes from Famous Books

... acquired an education without teachers, schools, or public libraries; that the peasants in the Vendee in the wars of the Revolution now and then defeated an enemy even without weapons; yet all these exceptions do not vitiate the rule—they only prove it; and therefore, although it is true that under certain special conditions single groups of workingmen in England have been able to improve their condition, to a certain limited extent, in certain minor branches of wholesale production, by an ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... will point to cases where we find people of entirely opposite tastes living lives of torture, because grouped in the same family, and forced by circumstances to stay there contrary to their wills. But that does not vitiate the law in the slightest, in each life we contract certain obligations which cannot then be fulfilled. Perhaps we have run away from a duty such as the care of an invalid relative and have met death without coming to ...

— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... military writing particularly, there is no excuse for vague terminology or phrases which do not convey an exact impression of what was done or what is intended. The military vocabulary is laden with words and expressions which sound professional but do not have definite meaning. They vitiate speech and the establishment would gladly rid itself of them if a way could be found. Men fall into the habit of saying "performed," "functioned" or "executed" and forget that "did" is in the dictionary. A ...

— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... infant at the aera of his household catastrophe. And if, through such burning examples of patriotism, far remote collateral descendants entered upon the succession, was this a reproach? Was this held to vitiate or to impair the heraldic honours? A disturbance, a convulsion, that shook the house back into its primitive simplicities of standing, was that a shock to its hereditary grandeur? If it had been, there perished ...

— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... weakness and compromising hesitation. Its principle and refrain, urged with abundant wit, ingenuity and courage, is simply EMANCIPATION—not on the narrow ground of abolition, but on the necessity of promptly destroying an evil which threatens to vitiate the white race. In the beginning the author points out the inevitableness of the present war, and that our political system has been hitherto a sacrifice to Slavery for the time, but also a running up of arrears in ...

— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

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