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
He hired four obscure artists to paint the illustrations exactly as he wanted them, and then got some second-rate poets to apostrophize the plants in sticky verse.
From Time Magazine Archive
Thus did Adolf Hitler apostrophize his beloved season, spring.
From Time Magazine Archive
No bright and overwhelming genius appeared in 1947 to light the way and apostrophize the age.
From Time Magazine Archive
Luckily, my business was to dance, and not to apostrophize the lady; and accordingly, when the waltz struck up, I hastened to claim, in the dumbest show, the honour of her hand.
From Letters from High Latitudes by Lord Dufferin
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
And in discussing the skill that has possessed and apostrophized her life, she can speak with objective authority and candor, as if the poet were not even there.
From Time Magazine Archive
Farther on the cataract is apostrophized as a destroyer, as an historian, a warning prophet, an oracle of truth, a tireless laborer.
From Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier by Frank H. Severance
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
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
For all its apostrophizing of the open road, most of the nation dutifully drives at 55 m.p.h., willingly undergoes searches before boarding planes, humbly douses cigarettes from time to time.
From Time Magazine Archive
The brig was immovable, and Barny finished with a duet volley of prayers and curses together, apostrophizing the hard case of a man being "done out o' his nor-aist coorse."
From Stories of Comedy by Rossiter Johnson
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