hospitalize
Americanverb (used with object)
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hospitalizes,
present (3rd person singular)
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hospitalized,
past participle, past
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hospitalizing
present participle
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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hospitalizesimple
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hospitalizessimple
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have hospitalizedperfect
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has hospitalizedperfect
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am hospitalizingprogressive
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are hospitalizingprogressive
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is hospitalizingprogressive
-
have been hospitalizingperfect progressive
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has been hospitalizingperfect progressive
Past
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hospitalizedsimple
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had hospitalizedperfect
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was hospitalizingprogressive
-
were hospitalizingprogressive
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had been hospitalizingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of hospitalize
Explanation
To hospitalize is either to check a patient into a hospital, or to injure someone seriously enough that they need to be treated in a hospital. If you get a bad infection, your doctor may decide to hospitalize you. Any time doctors decide that a patient ought to be treated intensively or needs a serious kind of surgery, they hospitalize their patient. It's more common to find this verb in the phrase "was hospitalized," as in "My favorite basketball player was hospitalized after collapsing on the court." Grammar snobs have long disapproved of verbs formed with the -ize suffix, and hospitalize was controversial when it was coined around 1870.
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:
Many were galvanized by the police’s decision over the weekend to forcibly hospitalize a prominent activist who has been on a hunger strike in support of the movement.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 20, 2026
When he gets unruly, they discharge or hospitalize him.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 10, 2024
Mabel Alvarez Benedicks told the AP that agents repeatedly ignored pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter as she felt pain in her bones, struggled to breathe and was unable to walk.
From Washington Times ● May 22, 2023
The girl’s mother had previously told The Associated Press that agents had repeatedly ignored her pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter, who had a history of heart problems and sickle cell anemia.
From Seattle Times ● May 21, 2023
I cannot get her out of this steel block unless I hospitalize her, perhaps operate.
From Sinister Paradise by Robert Moore Williams
Heat kills an average of 34 people a year and hospitalizes hundreds more in Miami-Dade, records showed.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 18, 2023
In the United States, it hospitalizes 2% to 3% of infants annually, mostly between 0 and 5 months of age.
From Science Magazine ● May 18, 2023
Every year, it hospitalizes an average of 1 to 2 percent of children younger than 6 months.
From Salon ● Nov. 3, 2022
She and other infectious-disease specialists are also revisiting their response to RSV, a common virus that hospitalizes about 60,000 children younger than 5 each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 13, 2022
“Each year, the flu sickens millions and hospitalizes hundreds of thousands of people during the fall and winter months. The elderly are especially hard hit every year,” said Peter Kirk, Sermo CEO.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 2, 2020
Convicted murderer Christa Gail Pike was hospitalized after she survived two doses of a lethal drug.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 7, 2026
Researchers from NYU Langone Health, City of Hope, and Memorial Sloan Kettering closely monitored 9,419 meals consumed by 173 hospitalized cancer patients and tracked changes in their gut microbiomes.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 7, 2026
I’ve missed work for appointments and used vacation days when she was hospitalized.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 24, 2026
Richie was hospitalized for the second time this summer after performing at St. Louis’ Muny in Forest Park in late August.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2026
“So you’ve never been hospitalized for mental difficulties before.”
From "It’s Kind of a Funny Story" by Ned Vizzini
It is still killing roughly 1,000 Americans each week and hospitalizing even more.
From New York Times ● May 5, 2023
"Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people and it is killing people."
From Salon ● Jan. 29, 2022
Unlike the fall-winter surge, which devastated Southern California’s denser urban communities, the latest Delta wave hammered the state’s rural and agricultural areas — infecting, hospitalizing and killing residents of some counties at unprecedented levels.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 9, 2021
Byers emphasized that Mississippi minors ages 5 to 17 are seeing the fastest growing number of coronavirus cases, with the highly transmissible delta variant hospitalizing young people at a high rate.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 21, 2021
Mother was confused, but she always has the good manners to be hospitalizing even to perfect strangers, so she asked them in and told me to run squeeze some orange juice.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
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.
