dematerialize
Americanverb (used with or without object)
verb
-
to cease to have material existence, as in science fiction or spiritualism
-
to disappear without trace; vanish
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of dematerialize
First recorded in 1880–85; de- + materialize
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:
The lively canvas, hardly an illustration of an event, employs light-reflective silver and golden-brown metallic paints applied in vast fields of paisley-like commas that dematerialize into a spatially ambiguous surface shimmer.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 29, 2024
The only thing more devastating than the abrupt disappearance of one parent is watching another dematerialize in slow-motion.
From Washington Post ● May 27, 2021
Restaurants have had it rough in South Lake Union, where Amazon workers love lunch and can get behind a happy hour, but tend to dematerialize at dinnertime.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 22, 2020
She has a distinctively concrete and practical way with photographs, and so avoids generic documentary techniques such as the vague and slow camera-moves, and the graphic transitions and effects that dematerialize photographs.
From The New Yorker ● May 9, 2016
The guy was so quiet and brooding, he almost seemed to dematerialize when he wasn’t speaking.
From "The House of Hades" by Rick Riordan
On the eve of a corruption investigation, he dematerialized from a New York street in 1930, perhaps carrying thousands of dollars from checks he’d just had cashed.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 21, 2026
Yet even in a very different, dematerialized moment for photography, Avedon’s silver gelatin friezes of 1969-71 still confound.
From New York Times ● Feb. 2, 2023
As the apparition dematerialized, Guido bid it farewell: “Toodle, Victah, ghost da poils!”
From Washington Post ● Jul. 14, 2022
It seemed like Wanda’s kids were dematerialized along with Vision, but those voices calling for help sound awfully familiar.
From Slate ● Mar. 5, 2021
In the electron we have matter dematerialized; the electron is not a material particle.
From The Breath of Life by Burroughs, John
“Interior walls are dematerializing, with rooms defined by glass doors or columns or completely open to each other.”
From Washington Post ● Feb. 15, 2017
The way the light reflects off the metallic columns is pleasing but also helps them blend in with their surroundings, an effect Ramsey calls "dematerializing."
From The Verge ● Feb. 28, 2016
As for Yeshua, the believed Messiah, he’s a smiling cipher given to dematerializing mid-confab, leaving behind enigmatic pronouncements and baffled followers.
From New York Times ● Feb. 18, 2016
And the dematerializing impulse was an international phenomenon, as the visually airy sampler “Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967-1978” makes clear.
From New York Times ● Apr. 25, 2013
“Of course not. Ridge will be dematerializing in front of our very eyes. According to him, at least. Not exactly the kind of thing Beejee needs to see.”
From "The First State of Being" by Erin Entrada Kelly
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.
