literalize
Americanverb (used with object)
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of literalize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Or to literalize the notion that, duh, relationships can be scary?
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 22, 2023
Is it too much to expect that a show about the difficulty of deciding between the light and the dark would, I dunno, literalize that conflict with a swoony bad influence?
From Slate ● Oct. 25, 2018
Something about Knott froze in childhood, leaving a body of work marked by the child’s tendency to literalize imaginative schemes.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 27, 2017
“The Whispers” throws in marital drama, nuclear sabotage and the F.B.I., and it has to literalize the invaders, who now manipulate electricity and can snatch a fighter jet out of the sky.
From New York Times ● May 31, 2015
Whether we believe in literal fire or not, we certainly ought to ask for a reason for the Master's failure to literalize the figurative word "fire."
From The Great Doctrines of the Bible by William Evans
The metaphor of foreign policy as a chess game is literalized with a cartoon Kissinger eyeing cartoon chess pieces.
From Salon ● Nov. 1, 2025
And now, the virus had literalized that psychic vulnerability, made it lethal.
From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2020
And that idea is wonderfully literalized during Endgame’s time travel scenes.
From The Verge ● Apr. 29, 2019
What’s most fascinating about the Sixers is that they’ve literalized pro sports’ championship-or-bust mindset.
From Slate ● Nov. 19, 2014
Nevertheless, pressure groups have seized on the music's theatrical excessiveness, literalized it, then tried to get all of rock to take the rap.
From Time Magazine Archive
The show emphasized giving and receiving, literalizing the story’s message of generosity and care.
From New York Times ● Nov. 21, 2022
Another show launched with a terrifying quote that gets to the heart of this, but "Westworld" fine-tunes it by literalizing how easily we accept falsehoods as real.
From Salon ● Jun. 26, 2022
One of the funniest sight gags sees him crash-landing, desk and all, into the homes of the people he’s cold-calling, brilliantly literalizing the intrusiveness of his job.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 5, 2018
The attraction obscures her view of the ocean, literalizing already narrow horizons, and casts deep, expressionistic blue and red light on the apartment’s dilapidated interior and its equally worn inhabitants.
From New York Times ● Nov. 30, 2017
But by literalizing this fact—by making print books the antidote for an actual disease—“The Word Exchange” comes dangerously close to arguing for literature as medicine.
From The New Yorker ● May 27, 2014
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
