transmute

The rosary presupposes our boredom, propensity to distraction, and impatience with dull routine and attempts to transmute these failings into the virtues of faith, hope and charity.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

Astrologers consult a national zodiac, palm readers ring pagodas, would-be alchemists attempt to transmute mercury into gold and SIM card companies advertise dial-a-diviners.

From Barron's ● Dec. 21, 2025

"What causes something to be insulating, conducting or magnetic? Can we transmute something into a different state?"

From Science Daily ● Nov. 17, 2025

According to Israel's Basic Law, the president "has the power to pardon criminals and reduce or transmute their sentence".

From BBC ● Nov. 12, 2025

When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby.

From "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

There, she transmutes noblewoman Marie d’Odette into a swan and assumes her identity.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 27, 2025

According to Slant magazine, the writer-director’s flair for “go-for-broke zaniness transmutes what might otherwise have been a lump of self-indulgent cliches into gold.”

From Washington Post ● Feb. 23, 2022

Like a sleazy alchemist, Hill transmutes shoestring budgets into cinematic gold, melting down and reshaping scrap metal into distinctive, often beautiful art.

From The Guardian ● Sep. 16, 2020

In a way it transmutes our very real and ongoing anxiety and sense of helplessness into something we can put eyes on, a vicarious and safely distant fantasy of disorder and detonation.

From Salon ● May 4, 2020

This newspaper instinct, which is developed by training but which one must possess in large measure before he can be successful in journalism, seizes upon everything and transmutes it into "copy" for the printer.

From The Critic in the Orient by George Hamlin Fitch

“Another Dimension” is his answer to the years of rejection, pain and incandescent ire, but transmuted into a vibrant, avant-garde, genre-defying gaping wound found within 11 tight tracks.

From Salon ● Jun. 5, 2026

As a Black woman who grew up in the segregated South, she transmuted the prejudice her community faced into striking scenes of human connection, many of them sketched from memory and some rendered as linocuts.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 23, 2026

In Heaney’s poetry the personal is always transmuted by a larger vision.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 21, 2025

She departed it as a bejeweled crown on a purple cushion, transmuted finally into pure visual symbol.

From New York Times ● Sep. 19, 2022

Thus in 1660 Boyle describes one experiment ‘as a plausible, though not demonstrative proof, that Water may be transmuted into Air’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

The idea of transmuting black rock into useful products was born out of similar energy-security anxieties a century ago.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 30, 2026

In the process of transmuting the mid-rib of the leaf, the plant undergoes a proliferation of new vascular tissue — and avoids rotting while the rest of the leaf withers away.

From New York Times ● Feb. 25, 2024

“In this first half, it’s very much about exploring all the different sort of versions and avenues of yourself as you’re growing and changing and transmuting into something else,” she says.

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 20, 2023

It’s not really a story, per se, which threw me when I first started thinking of transmuting it over to the modern era.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 25, 2022

But, nevertheless, they have one common enterprise, that of transmuting signs and symptoms into knowledge.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton