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Foolish or absurd behavior often makes us laugh. Take the 2006 comedy film Idiocracy, for instance, which depicts the United States in a dystopian future stultified by centuries of anti-intellectualism and crass commercialism. This description of the movie showcases one sense of stultify, “to cause to appear or be stupid, foolish, or absurdly illogical.” But there is nothing especially funny about the now-archaic original usage of the word. In mid-1700s legal contexts, if you stultified yourself, you claimed to be of unsound mind and thus not responsible for your actions. Nor is there humor in the most common current meaning of stultify, which refers to rendering someone or something dull or ineffective.
Examples of stultify in a Sentence
Holden Seidlitz, New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2026
Most shopping malls rely on marketing formulas that stultify the shopping experience and diminish our fun.
—Miami Herald Archives, Miami Herald, 23 Feb. 2026
All of this intellectual boundary-breaking can be intoxicating, especially against the backdrop of a wider culture that has at times tipped into stultifying speech codes and groupthink.
—Laura K. Field, The Atlantic, 5 Feb. 2026
That goal ended a ping-pong opening half-hour, one where stultifying rain meshed with a clunky performance from the hosts.
—Chris Weatherspoon, New York Times, 1 Dec. 2025
The New York Review of Books commented on that thesis, contending that men—mainly white and black—avoided work because the jobs were low-paid and stultifying.
—Peter Georgescu, Forbes, 5 May 2023
That was this Oscars in a nutshell: surprising warmth and sincere, unpolished emotions that blossomed in a stultifying format.
—Lili Loofbourow, Washington Post, 13 Mar. 2023
The goal is to stimulate, not stultify, productive economic activity—the kind that raises output and justifies increased wages.
—Judy Shelton, WSJ, 8 Mar. 2021
The sudden mass switch to virtual forms of working and socializing is expected to jump-start more nuanced investigations into what makes social interaction satisfying—or stultifying.
—Lydia Denworth, Scientific American, 1 July 2020
Cite this Entry
“Stultify.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stultify. Accessed 23 Jun. 2026.
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stultify
verb
