apostrophize
Americanverb (used with object)
verb (used without object)
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of apostrophize
First recorded in 1605–15; apostrophe 2 + -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:
Or that the prolix Gaev — a man as likely to apostrophize a piece of furniture as the stars above — keeps promising he’ll be quiet.
From New York Times ● Dec. 5, 2011
No bright and overwhelming genius appeared in 1947 to light the way and apostrophize the age.
From Time Magazine Archive
Thus did Adolf Hitler apostrophize his beloved season, spring.
From Time Magazine Archive
So did one medieval minstrel apostrophize his hero, suggesting that a good hunting dog might be a duke's best friend.
From Time Magazine Archive
I have many times heard orators apostrophize this beautiful flag which is the emblem of the Nation.
From President Wilson's Addresses by Harper, George McLean
Ali Tepelena, once apostrophized by Byron, was real; Albania certainly exists.
From New York Times ● Aug. 24, 2018
Sealing the message of political friendship was a video of the center’s namesake, apostrophized as “the greatest Irish American,” speaking during his visit to Ireland in 1963.
From Washington Post ● May 18, 2016
Intriguingly, many of the cultural figures whom Harrison has apostrophized in her art are men—Amerigo Vespucci, Charles Darwin, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as DiCaprio, Cheney, and, in his “Scarface” role, Al Pacino.
From The New Yorker ● Dec. 15, 2014
Mr. Mumford is not one to forget that Whitman apostrophized a locomotive, that Emerson thought a swift transatlantic liner could be as beautiful as a star, that Thoreau enjoyed wind singing on telegraph wires.
From Time Magazine Archive
During the journey Jacob Voss apostrophized the tenants at labour by their names.
From Bartholomew Sastrow Being the Memoirs of a German Burgomaster by Sastrow, Bartholomew
So why do we still read him, and why do so many people still flock to his plays, despite their archaisms lichened with footnotes and, to citizens of our ironic century, his easily parodied apostrophizing?
From Washington Post ● Sep. 8, 2021
Now, when she sat down to write in her notebook, she found herself apostrophizing anything that crossed her mind, addressing concepts and objects directly, trying to name their component parts.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 22, 2016
By way of apostrophizing his movement, Smith, 68, has just erected a $250,000 snow-white statue of Jesus Christ atop 1,500-ft.
From Time Magazine Archive
He once wrote: "In the great bulk of my prayers, vocal and mental, all my life, I have not felt I was talking to God in his presence, but rather apostrophizing him in his absence."
From Time Magazine Archive
I demanded, uncertain whether he were apostrophizing Diable's squaw, or abstract glory.
From Lords of the North by Laut, Agnes C. (Agnes Christina)
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.
