categorize
Americanverb (used with object)
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categorizes,
present (3rd person singular)
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categorized,
past participle, past
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categorizing
present participle
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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:
Large language models such as GPT and Gemini are changing that equation by allowing researchers to process and categorize vast amounts of text more consistently and quickly.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 13, 2026
That includes the way scientists categorize species within Homo as well as Australopithecus and Paranthropus, all of which lived during the past 5 million years.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 20, 2026
“Consumers tend to categorize prices into ranges, so having a price be under $10 can feel different than a price that is $10 and above, even when the actual monetary difference is negligible.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 14, 2026
Artists, she noted wryly, often prove difficult to categorize within bureaucratic systems.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 7, 2026
And then there are some things—an orange life vest, that one long paddle, a pair of plastic goggles, a lantern with cracked glass—I don’t know how to categorize.
From "The Wrong Way Home" by Kate O’Shaughnessy
Taiwan’s Olympic athletes must compete as “Chinese Taipei” and the World Trade Organization categorizes the semiconductor powerhouse as a “separate customs territory.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 3, 2026
The ISU categorizes somersault-like jumps as “choreographic elements.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 12, 2026
Wall Street categorizes metals as precious, base/industrial, and maybe “other” for the weird ones.
From Barron's ● Dec. 26, 2025
The International Union for Conservation of Nature red list categorizes lions as vulnerable to extinction.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 22, 2025
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
Since individual equity futures are legally categorized as security futures, companies like Kalshi that want to issue them need approval from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026
Using the Nova classification system, researchers categorized 81% of them as ultra-processed.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 29, 2026
And finally, she categorized either by their weights in the PCE or by treating each category individually.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 20, 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
The golden snub-nosed monkey, for example, is categorized as an endangered animal, but it has received very little in terms of attention or conservation dollars.
From "Camp Panda" by Catherine Thimmesh
This is someone who recently wrote a paper categorizing the ways AI might kill everyone, applying a mathematician’s instinct for order to the apocalypse.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 1, 2026
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
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
Stopping before the narrow garage, he sniffed the fumes from Paradise with great sensory pleasure, the protruding hairs in his nostrils analyzing, cataloguing, categorizing, and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog, mustard, and lubricant.
From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
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.
