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
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 Hamlin Garland
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 John H. (John Henry) Stapleton
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
For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness.
From Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature by William James
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.
