exteriorize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make exterior; externalize.
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Surgery. to expose (an internal structure) temporarily outside the body, for observation, surgery, or experimentation.
verb
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surgery to expose (an attached organ or part) outside a body cavity, esp in order to remove it from an operating area
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another word for externalize
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of exteriorize
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:
Sanders has spent his life transposing heavy human thought into gusting human breath, but hearing him exteriorize a few casual brain waves this intimately might be what finally blows you clean out of your life.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 1, 2021
Says Francoise: "It forces me to exteriorize my sentiments, using only my voice, my eyes and my face."
From Time Magazine Archive
Now, if that spirit of homage within us is sincere, it will naturally seek to exteriorize itself; if it is to be preserved, it must "out."
From Explanation of Catholic Morals A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals by Stapleton, John H. (John Henry)
He claims to have been able not merely to cause a hypnotized subject to exteriorize her astral self, but to mould this vapory substance as a sculptor models wax.
From The Shadow World by Garland, Hamlin
The interstitial world of texts, emails and social-media photographs, neither fully part of the material world nor fully within our own minds, acts as a kind of exteriorized collective imagination.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 30, 2025
Miranda’s ravaged inner life is exteriorized as in the medieval genre of psychomachia in which virtue and vice wage a battle for the soul.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 30, 2021
Somehow the internet has become this exteriorized imagination.
From Salon ● Jul. 16, 2018
The book, as a result, has a vague, detached, strangely exteriorized quality.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 30, 2014
Are these raps due to exteriorized vital force?
From The Problems of Psychical Research Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal by Carrington, Hereward
And these ways of exteriorizing the self hang together as the codes of a distinct subculture that has been meticulously cultivated, curated, and transmitted across generations—an heirloom of stylizations.
From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2018
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.
