Profundicate

//pɹəˈfʌndɪˌkeɪt// verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To make profound; to make a concept unnecessarily complicated. rare

    "To profundify or to profundicate: A Borenverb used to denote the use of thesauric and other enrichment techniques to make a simple idea appear to be profound. […] Graduates of agricultural institutions tend to use "to profundicate" while graduates of ivy league schools tend to use "to profundify"."

Synonyms

All synonyms
profundifyprofundify

Example

More examples

"To profundify or to profundicate: A Borenverb used to denote the use of thesauric and other enrichment techniques to make a simple idea appear to be profound. […] Graduates of agricultural institutions tend to use "to profundicate" while graduates of ivy league schools tend to use "to profundify"."

Etymology

Latin profundus (“profound”) + -icate. Apparently coined by American humorist James Boren (1925–2010) in When in Doubt, Mumble: A Bureaucrat's Handbook, New York, N.Y.: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1972, →OCLC.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.