transmogrify
verb (humorous)
 
- to transform in a surprising or magical manner

Oxford Languages

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WORD ORIGIN

“Transmogrify” meaning “to change completely, to transform into some other person or thing as if by magic”, is from the 1650s and is of unknown origin.

The Century Dictionary describes its usage as “humorous and contemptuous” suggesting it might be based on the word “transform”.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggests it could be a vulgar formation of “transmigrate”, which was used from c.1600 with reference to souls passing into other bodies after death.

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THE TRANSMOGRIFIED UGLY DUCHESS

A new exhibition at the National Gallery in London reexamines Quinten Massys’s 1513 painting “An Old Woman,” popularly known as “The Ugly Duchess.”

Curator and Renaissance art expert Emma Capron suggests the figure depicted may not be a woman but a cross-dressing man participating in a play on gender. Capron points to Massys’s interest in carnivals and the moresca festival dance, where men often cross-dressed as women.

The painting has been in the National Gallery for over 80 years and was the inspiration for Sir John Tenniel’s illustration of the duchess in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

Medical experts had previously speculated that the subject suffered from Paget’s disease, dwarfism, or elephantiasis, but Capron disagrees. She believes the work is a metaphor for the social disorder of the time and that Massys was merely having fun.

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SYNONYMS

- to enhance the value of something, or to make more efficient

add flesh to, augment, beef up, bolster/brighten/brush (up), ennoble, fine-tune, fix up, flesh out, ginger up, give a facelift (to), heighten, hike up, hone, illume, improve on, invigorate, jack/jazz up, kick it up a notch, liven up, make first rate (perfect), perk/polish (up), pump up, put flesh on the bones (of), revamp, revitalise, shape-shift, sharpen (up), smarten/soup (up), strengthen, take it to the next level, TRANSMOGRIFY, upgrade, vitalize, zhoosh (up)

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“Hey, how about a long weekend in London? We could visit the National Gallery and take a live-look at Quinten Massys’s TRANSMOGRIFIED Old Woman.”

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