depotentize

English

Alternative forms

• depotentise

Etymology

de- +‎ potent +‎ -ize

Verb

depotentize (third-person singular simple present depotentizes, present participle depotentizing, simple past and past participle depotentized)

1. To make less potent.
   • 1868, Gottlieb Heinrich Georg Jahr, Frederick Greenwood Snelling, Hull's Jahr: A New Manual of Homoeopathic Practice:

     It may act somewhat more decidedly upon this than upon the arterial, or rather it may tend to depotentize the arterial system in strict proportion as it may tend to cause a preponderance of the venous.

   • 2000, Edward C. Green, Indigenous Theories of Contagious Disease, page 79:

     People in a state of heat are not only dangerous to other people since they are contagious, they can also pass darkness or dirt on to cattle, and they can depotentize medicine and food.

   • 2004, Jeremy Naydler, Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts:

     This emphasis on the funerary interpretation has served only to depotentize Egyptian religion and to distort our understanding of ancient Egyptian religious sensibility.

   • 2012, Rebecca S. Watson, Chaos Uncreated:

     However, the notion that an originally “mythological” figure has been “depotentized”, then variously “repotentized” or further “demythologized” by later, dependent authors, though the “mythological” understanding finally prevailed in later Jewish literature, does not sound entirely convincing.