reify
Americanverb (used with object)
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of reify
First recorded in 1850–55; from Latin rē(s) “thing” + -ify
Explanation
When you reify something abstract, you make it real. You might reify your affection for Italy by hanging posters of the Italian Riviera on your wall and cooking Italian food every night. Reify, which is three syllables — ree-uh-fye — comes from the Latin word res, which means "thing," with the suffix -fy, meaning "make into" or "produce," which you know from verbs like "horrify" and "falsify." You may already know the Latin word res, too. From your study of literature, you've probably encountered the phrase in medias res, "in the middle of things," used to describe a story that begins in the middle of the action.
Vocabulary lists containing reify
Power Suffix: -fy
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-fy
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Florida's B.E.S.T. Common Suffixes: -ify
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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:
And they wouldn’t need to reify all of Chevron and the whole precedent around every single detail.
From Slate ● Jul. 17, 2024
The brain latches on or compares itself to others, starting a negative cycle of thinking that can reify itself.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 1, 2024
They ask critical questions about colleges as sites that perpetuate classism, places that not only reify hierarchies of value but rely on it as part of their mythology.
From Salon ● Jul. 31, 2021
We can use the mythology of the frontier, he writes, “to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past,” or we can use it as a way of “imagining and speaking truth.”
From New York Times ● Dec. 21, 2017
Markets reify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, or whatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodied in the product.
From The Civilization of Illiteracy by Mihai Nadin
The babydoll dress has a long and complex history, one that’s been associated with women’s sartorial freedom as much as it’s reified their cultural infantilization.
From Salon ● Jun. 12, 2026
We play by a code of conduct, that nebulous thing we have reified as “international law.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 8, 2025
Each count, Mr Teltumbde argues, "did not merely record caste, but reified and hardened it".
From BBC ● Nov. 12, 2025
Pitsilionis was born in Greece; he credits his commitment to hospitality in part to his homeland’s culture, reified working in his family’s restaurant after they moved to Kenai, Alaska.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 4, 2023
In the first place, language itself is reified and consumed.
From The Civilization of Illiteracy by Mihai Nadin
There is a difference, albeit a subtle one, between erasing one class of people while reifying another, and mocking the entire project of balancing genuine, and competing interests.
From Slate ● Dec. 5, 2022
Based off the conventions and what exists in the world in terms of cyborgian narratives, I wanted to contribute something that isn’t reifying those projects.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 29, 2022
The main specialties of gender-affirming care — endocrinology and plastic surgery — were founded in the early 1900s, not as a means of transmogrifying gender but rather as tools for reifying it.
From New York Times ● May 10, 2022
Simply reifying the railroad—the fulcrum of the novel itself—was enough to hint at the book’s wonderful strangeness, without revealing too much.
From Slate ● Dec. 6, 2016
The entire history of reifying the past was summarized in the university and projected as a model for the future.
From The Civilization of Illiteracy by Mihai Nadin
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.
