Dictionary

misanthropize en · VERB

Etymology

From mis- + anthropize or misanthropy + -ize.

Meanings

1. (intransitive) To hate mankind.
   • A thousand cunning things they do, To urge me to misanthropize; My heart is filled with endless rue — (It does no good to alkalize). 1957, High Points in the Work of the High Schools of New York City:
   • If you fail me I shall misanthropize, misogynize, misobrephize, shut myself up in a cell(ar). 2012, Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, page 37:
   • To genuflect is not to misanthropize. To contemplate, even worship, deity is not to misanthropize. To understand man as laughing guanine, as the tarsier that skipped a few grades, may be to berate us, may be to misanthropize. 2001, Adrian Trehorse, The Last Angry White Man, page 342:
2. (transitive) To make misanthropic
   • Here, nature is absent and architecture is simply a "borgo" crammed with generic people ("gente", "persona", "malevoli", "uomini") sometimes deprecatingly reduced to animalesque masses ("stuol", "greggia") who misanthropize the poet's heart. 1980, Jeanne Carol Dillon, Giacomo Leopardi's Idylls and Nineteenth-century European Landscape Painting:
   • The contemptible ignorance, credulity, and fraud, which support its tyrannous authority, as a supernatural revelation, and the futile attempt to enforce a belief of its liberal meaning as indispensable to the happiness of mankind, and the universal degradation and miserty which it perpetuates, by the inbred hostility which all its priesthoods have ever evinced towards every improvement that would enlighten and elevate the human mind, have done more to disgust and misanthropize all ingenuous and rational minds, and to inspire them with a settled aversion for the ways of man and his institutions, than all the other moral and physical evils now experienced in Christendom. 1842, Logan Mitchell, The Christian mythology unveiled, lectures, page 40:
   • His ways are indeed wonderful, — how wonderful, eternity alone can show, where we shall see the connection of what we are pleased to call trivial events with His most stupendous schemes, and all that is dark and difficult and melancholy in this unintelligible world, all that gives our presumptuous reasoning hard thoughts of God, all that has grieved and disappointed and misanthropized, will be fully explained, and merged in one unclouded blaze of glory. 1869, Stopford Augustus Brooke, Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, page 38:

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