Weekly Word: Bowlderize

To bowlderize means “to remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable” from a book or other written work.

The word comes from the man Thomas Bowdler, an “English editor who in 1818 published a notorious expurgated Shakespeare, ‘in which those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’” (OED). Shakespeare had to be censored? I bet Bowlder is turning over in his grave right now, what with modern entertainment and all.