Bowdlerize (BOHD-ler-ize) describes the early 19th century policy of some publishers to modify or delete passages of books that they considered to be objectionable, particularly for children. The term comes from Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), an English physician, who, in 1818, published a censored version of William Shakespeare (The Family Shakespeare), expurgating “those words and expressions… which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”