Demonize
verb ·3 syllables ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To turn into a demon. transitive
- 2 make into a demon wordnet
- 3 To describe or represent as evil or diabolic, usually falsely. figuratively, transitive
"President Trump has seized on the response in the streets to police brutality against Black men and women to bolster his re-election campaign, employing provocative and sometimes incendiary language and images to incite his followers, demonize his opponents or both."
Example
More examples"When you demonize the indigenous people of some land, people from other countries would not question the occupation of their land or even their extermination. Brand them as "savage" or "terrorists", and nobody would question the confiscation of their land."
Etymology
From Medieval Latin daemonizō, from daemon + -izō. Compare Ancient Greek δαιμονίζομαι (daimonízomai, “to be possessed by a demon”), from δαίμων (daímōn, “demon”). By surface analysis, demon + -ize.
More for "demonize"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.