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:
Ms. Dixon even tries to categorize the different types of artistic offense.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 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
Artists, she noted wryly, often prove difficult to categorize within bureaucratic systems.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 7, 2026
There’s been little new science on the 19 peptides since the FDA’s 2023 decision to categorize them as unsafe.
From Salon ● Apr. 4, 2026
Gender, a grammatical term for “kind,” describes the ways some languages categorize nouns and pronouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter.
From "Woe Is I" by Patricia T. O'Conner
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
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
She already has some ideas, which she categorizes as “baddie florals.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 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
The A&E network categorized “Desert Law,” the TV series about the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, as a modest success, a spokesman said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 2, 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
About 30% of the remaining spending growth was categorized as new, either by newly created programs or the expansion of existing services.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2026
Of all the black employees working in research at Langley in the early 1960s, there were still only five categorized as engineers and sixteen with the title of mathematician.
From "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly
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
Agencies must submit “contingency plans” categorizing which employees are essential on a standardized worksheet.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2025
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
“I’m categorizing them according to attraction type,” said Marjory.
From "Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics" by Chris Grabenstein
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.
