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allegorize

American  
[al-i-guh-rahyz] / ˈæl ɪ gəˌraɪz /
especially British, allegorise

verb (used with object)

allegorized, allegorizing
  1. to make into an allegory; narrate allegorically.

  2. to understand in an allegorical sense; interpret allegorically.


verb (used without object)

allegorized, allegorizing
  1. to use allegory.

allegorize British  
/ ˈælɪɡəˌraɪz /

verb

  1. to transform (a story, narrative, fable, etc) into or compose in the form of allegory

  2. (tr) to interpret allegorically

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms


Etymology

Origin of allegorize

1425–75; late Middle English < Late Latin allēgorīzāre; see allegory, -ize


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:

Shostakovich flagrantly abuses these genres to allegorize how most of the men in his opera treat most of the women.

From New York Times ● Oct. 6, 2022

In 2021, though, it’s rare that a genre pic doesn’t attempt to allegorize contemporary social problems.

From Slate ● Aug. 26, 2021

There are plenty of obvious ways a 21st-century novelist could allegorize a story like Brinkley’s.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 23, 2013

He was a theater experimenter, a provider of vivid, cacophonous stage tableaus, incorporating ballads, verse and mime within demanding scripts that often used historical settings to dramatize, allude to or allegorize timeless issues.

From New York Times ● Apr. 3, 2012

Next come the many attempts, old and new, to allegorize the Olympian scene, or to explain it away.

From Homer's Odyssey A Commentary by Denton Jaques Snider

It tweaked the movie-cowboy archetype at a time when westerns allegorized the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.

From New York Times ● Jun. 22, 2023

And they often, though by no means always, center on aspects of the queer struggle—themes to which Highsmith’s novels after The Price of Salt continued to return, if only in oblique, highly allegorized fashion.

From Slate ● Nov. 19, 2015

The picture is saturated in a kind of allegorized romanticism that is curiously musty.

From Time Magazine Archive

Though he hardly clarifies his intention, Mailer apparently figures that he has thus allegorized Vietnam as a case of Texas-style Americans neurotically in love with war.

From Time Magazine Archive

The loves of Faustus and Helen are readily allegorized into the passion of the Renaissance for classical beauty, the passion to which all that is not beauty seemed very dross. 

From Helen of Troy by Andrew Lang

If it’s an allegory, it trivializes whatever it’s allegorizing.

From Washington Post ● Nov. 30, 2021

He was a superbly professional storyteller, but his work was at times flawed by facile allegorizing.

From Time Magazine Archive

In 1924 he caused a ripple in sculpture and religious circles with his bronze, The Chrysalis, allegorizing mankind's evolution, from the ape.

From Time Magazine Archive

Its philosophical allegorizing might attract the Gentile to the Jewish Scriptures, but it also led the Jew away from his special conduct of life.

From Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria by Norman Bentwich

But if they are so fond of allegorizing, why do they not explain the apostles, rather than any others, to be those fathers, whose appointed landmarks it is so unlawful to remove?

From Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations by Charles William Eliot

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