1700–10; < Medieval Latin Anglic ( us ) English + -ize
To anglicize something is to change it so that it appears to be more English. Immigrants to the United States sometimes anglicize their names so they're more familiar to English-speaking Americans. If you anglicize your house, you might decorate it in the style of a British tea room, and if you anglicize your Polish name, you make it sound less Polish and more English. Throughout history, places that were colonized by England were forced to anglicize many of their place names — one example is Kolkata, India, which was anglicized to "Calcutta" and changed back in 2001. Anglicize comes from the Latin root Angli, or "the English."
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Usoltsev did not address concerns about the alleged tendency of the app to Anglicize results and referred The Washington Post to an FAQ on the Prisma Labs website.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 8, 2022
Occasionally, he had to push back against publishers who wanted to italicize or Anglicize Swahili and Arabic references and phrases in his books, he said.
From New York Times ● Oct. 7, 2021
Emily Woo Zeller, a Chinese American narrator, has sometimes clashed with directors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages, such as tofu or kung fu.
From Slate ● Jun. 21, 2021
Robin Philpot, a prominent Quebec writer, argued that Montreal should guard against a long-standing drive by the British conquerors of Quebec and their descendants to Anglicize the names of streets and bridges in the city.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 10, 2020
Mrs. Burton strove to make Eve ornamental so that she might acquire millions; Mrs. Williams strove to Anglicize and Europeanize her son so that he might ornament those which were already his.
From The Spread Eagle and Other Stories by Morris, Gouverneur
It's common for Italian Americans like DeSantis to anglicize their names, swapping, in the governor's case, the Italian pronunciation of "day" with "deh," Professor William Connell, Seton Hall Unveristy's chair of Italian Studies, said.
From Salon ● Jun. 1, 2023
“Now, to make it even more fun, if you anglicize the Spanish phonetic spelling, that’s when you finally get to ‘Hueneme.’”
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 6, 2022
During last summer’s World Cup, Australian TV anchor Lucy Zelić was criticized for pronouncing players’ ethnic names correctly, a refusal to anglicize that some viewers saw as obnoxious overpronunciation.
From Slate ● Feb. 14, 2019
Lots of people with names difficult to spell and pronounce anglicize them, so maybe that's a possibility here, since you mention other family members have done something similar.
From Slate ● Aug. 13, 2012
He sought, therefore, both to disarm them politically and to anglicize them socially, by amalgamating their political system with that of wholly British Upper Canada.
From The Framework of Home Rule by Childers, Erskine
In 1812, a year of dramatic battles in North America, Europe and Russia, some Russians founded a Sonoma County outpost called Fort Ross, probably an Anglicized mangling of the word “Russ,” for Russia.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 1, 2025
Those of you who enjoy a bit of English literature might recognize Tokaji under its Anglicized name, tokay, which aristocrats like to swizzle in period romances and gaslit murder mysteries.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 23, 2023
His father, Clarence Rufus Rorem — the family name was an Anglicized version of the Norwegian Rorhjem — was a medical economist who taught at Earlham College in Richmond.
From New York Times ● Nov. 18, 2022
This practice goes back even further: After British colonial forces left India in the late 1940s, right-wing Hindu nationalist leaders replaced many Anglicized place names with Hindu ones.
From Salon ● Oct. 15, 2022
It’s time to admit that data has joined agenda, erotica, insignia, opera, stamina, and other technically plural Latin and Greek words that have become thoroughly Anglicized as singular nouns taking singular verbs.
From "Woe Is I" by Patricia T. O'Conner
And, unlike earlier generations, Indian American candidates are running without Anglicizing their names.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2024
Des and Devi also discuss Anglicizing Indian names.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 12, 2022
To the irritation of his publishers, he sometimes resorts to footnotes to explain unfamiliar terms or episodes from Chinese history, rather than omitting or Anglicizing them.
From New York Times ● Dec. 3, 2019
On the one hand, it has made the Anglicizing of international communications ever more unstoppable.
From The New Yorker ● Oct. 24, 2016
From the reign of Elizabeth onwards, English Protestant schools were founded by the government in a sporadic and intermittent fashion in pursuance Historic retrospect. of its Anglicizing policy.
From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 10 "Echinoderma" to "Edward" by Various
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.
