BOWDLERIZE

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BOWDLERIZE, also BrE & AusE bowdlerise. To censor or expurgate a text after the style of Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), editor of an edition of Shakespeare's plays from which explicit sexual references and avowedly vulgar elements were removed: ‘When The Taming of the Shrew was staged in New York's Shakespeare festival this summer, it was bowdlerised to dilute the bard's misogynist sentiments’ (‘Male, modern, macho’, The Times Saturday Review, 10 Nov. 1990).

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