commodify
Americanverb (used with object)
-
to turn into a commodity; make commercial.
-
to treat as if a commodity.
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of commodify
First recorded in 1975–80; commod(ity) ( def. ) + -ify ( def. )
Explanation
If your friend was charging you money to hang out with him, he would be trying to commodify your relationship, which means "turn into an opportunity to make money." Commodify comes from commodity, which often means "an item that can be bought and sold for money," plus the suffix -ify which is usually used to mean "make or turn into." So this word means "to make or turn into something that can be bought and sold for money." This term is often used in a disapproving way to imply that whatever is being commodified shouldn't be, maybe because it's special or private.
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:
“Maybe the hotel industry will finally start paying attention and realize they can’t commodify privacy,” she said, “because people will just take their money and their travel budget to hotels that still have bathroom doors.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 20, 2026
"It's driven by this desire to make money out of this – the more likes people can get the more they can possibly commodify the photography they're getting in these places", Garrett said.
From BBC ● Jan. 12, 2026
The pursuit of online fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their daughter’s images.
From New York Times ● Feb. 22, 2024
The thing I love about poetry is its uselessness, the way it is, with a few exceptions, superfluous to capital, difficult to commodify, gratuitous in its insistence on avowing that which has been marked valueless.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 23, 2023
According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn’t prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers.
From "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
It’s all done in the name of shedding the constraints of a commodified society to find personal and artistic freedom.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 7, 2026
They have been much more concerned about businesses like Qlik and Qualtrics, which help companies analyze and visualize data, tasks that some investors think could become commodified.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 26, 2026
We live in an age when morality is commodified.
From Salon ● Oct. 29, 2025
Replacing this with automated mimicry suggests a disturbing turn toward commodified and monolingual film culture, she says.
From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2025
The more commodified and restricted our access to information, the less efficient the operation of the market, the more poorly it allocates resources in our society.
From The Public Domain Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle
If no one besides academic researchers is willing to take a firm stance against device use among kids, the hesitation only serves the companies that stand to profit from manipulating and commodifying children’s attention.
From Salon ● Jun. 21, 2026
The kitschiness fuels a debate about whether commodifying “dark tourism” is distasteful or makes history more accessible.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 12, 2024
“What is difficult for me is that you’re commodifying the act of giving a compliment,” she says.
From Scientific American ● Jan. 30, 2023
The album honors the Black American folk tradition without bastardizing or commodifying it.
From Slate ● Dec. 7, 2021
Tech companies, most notably Google, quickly recognized the value of online habits and the data they generated, collecting and commodifying internet activity before users or governments understood its importance.
From New York Times ● Dec. 10, 2020
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.
