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
But as elliptical as his prose can sometimes be, Milch also has a way of using his characters’ convoluted talk to literalize the way they’re figuring themselves out.
From Time ● Jan. 27, 2012
He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined.
From The Damnation of Theron Ware by Frederic, Harold
The metaphor of foreign policy as a chess game is literalized with a cartoon Kissinger eyeing cartoon chess pieces.
From Salon ● Nov. 1, 2025
Mac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator.
From New York Times ● Jan. 20, 2022
And that idea is wonderfully literalized during Endgame’s time travel scenes.
From The Verge ● Apr. 29, 2019
Competition among the women on the show isn’t literalized in the form of elimination rounds, but it does play out in the now-familiar reality TV language of catty exchanges and wounded reaction shots.
From Slate ● Aug. 13, 2012
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 best dystopias extrapolate issues in our society and make us see them more clearly by literalizing their metaphorical conceits.
From New York Times ● Nov. 1, 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
The action is periodically distorted by wide-angle lenses, literalizing our sense of this ritualized world as an oversize fishbowl.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 22, 2019
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.
