categorize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to arrange in categories or classes; classify.
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to describe by labeling or giving a name to; characterize.
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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categoristnoun
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categorizationnoun
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decategorizationnoun
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subcategorizationnoun
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decategorizeverb (used with object)
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miscategorizeverb (used with object)
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recategorizeverb (used with object)
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miscategorizedadjective
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uncategorizedadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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categorizesimple
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categorizessimple
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have categorizedperfect
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has categorizedperfect
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am categorizingprogressive
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are categorizingprogressive
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is categorizingprogressive
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have been categorizingperfect progressive
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has been categorizingperfect progressive
Past
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categorizedsimple
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had categorizedperfect
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was categorizingprogressive
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were categorizingprogressive
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had been categorizingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of categorize
First recorded in 1695–1705; categor(y) + -ize
Explanation
If you decided to categorize your wardrobe, you could sort it by type (pants or shirts), or by color. To categorize is to put something into a category. When you think of categorizing things, imagine taking a pile of marbles and putting them into little boxes by color. You are sorting things by how they are alike. Scientists categorize animals and plants by their properties. Doctors categorize illnesses by whether they are caused by viruses or bacteria. In movies, high school students are often categorized as jocks, popular kids, troublemakers, and geeks.
Vocabulary lists containing categorize
Vocabulary of the Common Core
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Content Summary G.2: Regionalization
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Content Summary 5.1: Causes of the Atlantic Revolutions
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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:
Soon, the word became a stand-in for “catchy,” shorthand that could be used to categorize just about any song with a single word.
From Salon ● May 10, 2026
Adams was reluctant to categorize his sensibility, but he acknowledged that he gravitated toward plays “that have some invitation for design innovation while being centered on human beings.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 8, 2026
Apps like Rocket Money can link bank accounts, categorize spending habits and flag unused subscriptions.
From MarketWatch ● Mar. 31, 2026
But this opacity means there is no agreed-on way to define, measure or categorize private credit.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 29, 2026
Many natives, seeking to categorize the newcomers, were open to the possibility that they might belong to the realm of the supernatural.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Just 16% of respondents expressed a state of confidence about their money, a separate bucket that the survey categorizes as financially “fulfilled.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 2, 2026
Wall Street categorizes metals as precious, base/industrial, and maybe “other” for the weird ones.
From Barron's ● Dec. 26, 2025
She already has some ideas, which she categorizes as “baddie florals.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2025
Among left-leaning Americans, there's no dominant religious categorization, at least in the manner that the media categorizes them.
From Salon ● Oct. 18, 2024
Sister Miriam Joseph* categorizes the relation of the trivial arts as follows: logic is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-known; grammar is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized; rhetoric is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated.
From "Words Like Loaded Pistols" by Sam Leith
Using the Nova classification system, researchers categorized 81% of them as ultra-processed.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 29, 2026
Some companies didn’t disclose dollar figures for each individual perk; reporters generally categorized these aggregate amounts in “other.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 25, 2026
The study also categorized unemployment claims by age and found that a significant portion of claims were from those aged 36 to 65, signaling that AI’s effect doesn’t only affect early-career jobs.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 4, 2026
Teledyne, often categorized as an industrial-sensing company, is embedded in the counterdrone detection chain through systems already operational in active theaters.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 29, 2026
Eddie looks inside boxes, and touches things I put on the big table because I haven’t categorized them yet.
From "The Wrong Way Home" by Kate O’Shaughnessy
Apps are great for tracking spending and automatically categorizing — making it easy to see that you spent this much more on food than clothes, or what you’re putting toward subscriptions.
From MarketWatch ● May 14, 2026
I often wonder: Does their categorizing need extend to the subatomic realm?
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 6, 2026
The human data annotator team at xAI plays a key role in teaching Grok to understand the world by labeling, contextualizing, and categorizing raw data used to train the chatbot.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 15, 2025
That's the lower limit of categorizing objects on the Torino Scale.
From Salon ● Mar. 3, 2025
Children can explore the timbre, production, and material of the instruments to come up with their own ways of categorizing them.
From "Music and the Child" by Natalie Sarrazin
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.
