propitiate

Before he was reinstated, the Anderson School’s Faculty Executive Committee tried to propitiate the mob by announcing itself “saddened” by Klein’s “troubling conduct.”

From Washington Post ● Oct. 8, 2021

I suspect that Oskar probably still believes that it was just something in my nature: that somebody needed to be sacrificed on the altar on the way to propitiate whatever, and that that was him.

From Slate ● Jun. 28, 2016

Was it just to tell the date or propitiate some mountain deity?

From The Guardian ● Feb. 8, 2013

Mr. Talbott, who won the first Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award for a new play with “The Submission,” understands the conflicting urges to propitiate and attack that spring from the insecurities of a life in the theater.

From New York Times ● Sep. 28, 2011

Roger’s daemon anxiously wagged her terrier tail to propitiate him.

From "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

Of William’s father, who propitiates a wealthy relative, we read: “he wasn’t a mercenary man, but this was his only rich unmarried aunt.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 10, 2026

While it powerfully propitiates the reader, it almost converts condemnation into compassion.

From Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey by Joseph Cottle

Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him, and imitation is the perfection of divine service.

From Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII by Alexander Maclaren

One of nobler birth propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.

From The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell

And nothing so effectually as an evening bath, as my experience testifies, cures fatigue and propitiates to dreamless slumber....

From With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3 by Various

True to form, Iranians haven't been propitiated by such gestures.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

I promise I won't let our multithreaded discussion veer too far down the red carpet, but the Oscars are the Oscars; their vestal fires burn, their gods must be propitiated.

From Slate ● Jan. 16, 2014

They must be fed and put to sleep, propitiated with hymns, songs and prayers.

From Time Magazine Archive

In India, however, the accused was feared and terribly propitiated by millions as Kali, goddess of death and catastrophe, wife-conqueror of the eternal Siva, the dancer.

From Time Magazine Archive

The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

He suggests that they may have perceived the cave walls as a kind of membrane between their world and the spirits, and thus created their paintings as a means of propitiating them.

From The Guardian ● May 23, 2020

On this teacher’s advice, the Dalai Lama had himself been propitiating this dangerous spirit – along with innumerable other esoteric rituals – as part of his daily four hours of meditation and spiritual exercise.

From Newsweek

The Wanyamwezi being great travellers, they have numberless ways of propitiating the Musimo.

From Fetichism in West Africa Forty Years' Observations of Native Customs and Superstitions by Robert Hamill Nassau

Yet the chief of them all and his immediate disciples founded a hermitage in the wilderness, where they devoted themselves to propitiating the wrath of God.

From A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages; volume II by Henry Charles Lea

Afterwards the brothers dug a deep well, and on the pretence of propitiating the water spirit induced their wives to stand round the well with offerings of rice, &c., in their hands.

From Santal Folk Tales by A. Campbell