propitiate

So when an epidemic gets underway, we don’t waste time on sacrifices to propitiate angry gods or fretting about deadly miasmas seeping in with the night air.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 28, 2020

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

But under the logic of the bailout, the markets were in charge, and the overarching aim of the government was to propitiate them to avoid disaster.

From New York Times ● Jun. 25, 2010

His dæmon growled softly; the golden monkey dropped his head low to propitiate her.

From "The Amber Spyglass" 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

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

Ages, empires, civilisations pass, and leave some members even of educated mankind still, in certain points, on the level of the savage who propitiates with gifts, or addresses with prayers, the spirits of the dead.

From Cock Lane and Common-Sense by Andrew Lang

There is a humble, civil air about the people in the Vallée d'Ossau, which propitiates one: the berret is always taken off as a stranger passes, and a kind salutation uniformly given.

From Béarn and the Pyrenees A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre by Louisa Stuart Costello

The Indian yields to it a sort of worship, propitiates it with offerings of tobacco, thanks it in prosperity, and upbraids it in disaster.

From The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century by Francis Parkman

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

For 700 years the Romans propitiated a special god of stem rust, Robigo.

From Time Magazine Archive

He propitiated many of Germany's other former enemies by dropping to his knees in front of a memorial to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto.

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

I am sorry myself that there are no adventures of the blood-curdling sort in it; but I could not go out of my way, nor do tramps find time, it seems, for propitiating cannibals.

From The Bonadventure A Random Journal of an Atlantic Holiday by Edmund Blunden

Then his aching disappointment revealed to him that, in spite of his anger, he had been expecting a propitiating note, and perhaps a renewal of her invitation to dinner.

From Playing With Fire by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

They trace their origin to the same source whence come the notions of propitiating the fairies by euphemistic names.

From British Goblins Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes