“bowdlerize: To expurgate a book. In 1818 an English physician, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), gave to the world a ten-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works ‘in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’ Bowdler later treated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in the same way. Hence, we have the words bowdlerist, bowdlerizer, bowdlerism, bowdlerization, etc.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Mark's Text Terminal 