Grammar Tips & Articles »

vitiate - vocabulary

This Grammar.com article is about vitiate - vocabulary — enjoy your reading!


47 sec read
1,959 Views
  Ed Good  —  Grammar Tips
Font size:

verb

To impair the quality of, spoil; to debase, corrupt. In law, to make defective, as in to vitiate a claim.

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving, dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same.

—Edmund Burke Reflections on the French Revolution (1790)

Rate this article:

Have a discussion about this article with the community:

0 Comments

    Citation

    Use the citation below to add this article to your bibliography:

    Style:MLAChicagoAPA

    "vitiate - vocabulary." Grammar.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 3 Oct. 2024. <https://www.grammar.com/vitiate-vocabulary>.

    Free, no signup required:

    Add to Chrome

    Check your text and writing for style, spelling and grammar problems everywhere on the web!

    Free, no signup required:

    Add to Firefox

    Check your text and writing for style, spelling and grammar problems everywhere on the web!

    Free Writing Tool:

    Instant
    Grammar Checker

    Improve your grammar, vocabulary, style, and writing — all for FREE!


    Quiz

    Are you a grammar master?

    »
    Choose the sentence with correct use of the article:
    A They have seen a UFO last night.
    B A cat is a pet.
    C She is reading an interesting novel.
    D He goes to university.

    Improve your writing now:

    Download Grammar eBooks

    It’s now more important than ever to develop a powerful writing style. After all, most communication takes place in reports, emails, and instant messages.