allegorize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make into an allegory; narrate allegorically.
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to understand in an allegorical sense; interpret allegorically.
verb (used without object)
verb
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to transform (a story, narrative, fable, etc) into or compose in the form of allegory
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(tr) to interpret allegorically
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:
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
Partly this was because Tillstrom was able to allegorize some grown-up themes.
From New York Times ● May 6, 2011
She has said these songs allegorize intensely personal moments in her life.
From Slate ● Mar. 1, 2010
To treat as allegorical; to understand in an allegorical sense; as, when a passage in a writer may understood literally or figuratively, he who gives it a figurative sense is said to allegorize it.
From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary by Noah Webster
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 opposite theory interpreted myths by an Euhemeristic process, or allegorized them by regarding them as originally descriptions of the physical processes of nature.
From History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion by Adam Storey Farrar
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
Philo's philosophy was in great part a philosophy of the law; the Patristic school borrowed his allegorizing method and produced a philosophy of religious dogma!
From Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria by Norman Bentwich
Bacon's final conclusion seems to be that, although allegorical poetry does exist, allegory is not essential to poetry and that the wholesale allegorizing of the middle ages was far off the mark.
From Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism by Donald Lemen Clark
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