anthropomorphize

American  

[an-thruh-puh-mawr-fahyz] / ˌæn θrə pəˈmɔr faɪz /

especially British, anthropomorphise

verb (used with or without object)

anthropomorphized, anthropomorphizing

1. to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).

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anthropomorphize British  

/ ˌænθrəpəˈmɔːfaɪz /

verb

1. to attribute or ascribe human form or behaviour to (a god, animal, object, etc)

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Other Word Forms

• anthropomorphization
  noun

Etymology

Origin of anthropomorphize

First recorded in 1835–45; anthropomorph(ic) ( def. ) + -ize

Explanation

When you talk about a thing or animal as if it were human, you're anthropomorphizing it. The Easter Bunny is an anthropomorphized rabbit. People anthropomorphize all the time. If you've ever seen a dog in a sweater, that's a small case of an owner anthropomorphizing his pet. A cartoon dog who talks is a bigger case of anthropomorphizing. Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree anthropomorphizes the tree — the tree acts as if it were a person. It may seem kind of bizarre, but treating non-human things as human is a way of imagining another point of view.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

anthropomorphize anthropomorphized anthropomorphizing

"Even the instances that did anthropomorphize AI varied widely in strength."

From Science Daily ● Apr. 19, 2026

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and even inanimate objects, says Ayanna Howard, dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and a roboticist who has researched why humans blindly trust machines.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 20, 2026

To call a river a person is not to anthropomorphize water, but rather to widen and deepen the category of ‘person’.

From Salon ● May 28, 2025

There’s something about human nature to anthropomorphize objects or anything.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 28, 2023

Charles was always one to anthropomorphize creatures, seeds, rocks even, and could be overheard talking to them as if they understood.

From "Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith" by Deborah Heiligman

Eventually, he finds himself inside a barn with anthropomorphized hay and other frights.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 27, 2026

Bees have been anthropomorphized on screen, in films like “Bee Movie,” and on cereal boxes.

From Salon ● Apr. 17, 2025

Meanwhile, two other notable releases took anthropomorphized animals down very different paths: The French-Spanish “Robot Dreams” and the American “Migration.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 15, 2023

CEOs have been talking and certainly thinking like anthropomorphized copies of Atlas Shrugged for decades.

From Slate ● Sep. 14, 2023

And yet these Forewords and Afterwords become interesting enough when taken up in connection with a study of the historical anthropomorphized Odin.

From The Younger Edda Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda by Anderson, Rasmus Björn

The author acknowledges the risk of anthropomorphizing but finds the totality of evidence persuasive.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 13, 2025

The piece emphasizes that “artificial intelligence” is fundamentally a marketing term rather than a scientific one, arguing that AI promoters exploit public misunderstanding by anthropomorphizing chatbots and labeling their mistakes as “hallucinations.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2025

“I don’t like anthropomorphizing AI,” Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella told Bloomberg Television on Monday, referring to the practice of using verbs and nouns to describe AI that are typically reserved for people.

From Seattle Times ● May 21, 2024

"This can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and for journalists to feed into the hype machine, by, for example, anthropomorphizing AI technologies, and mythologizing tech companies."

From BBC ● Mar. 13, 2024

You're anthropomorphizing," I told Moya, "but that's the way I see it.

From Attrition by Krenkel, Roy G.