hospitalize
Americanverb (used with object)
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
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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
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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
Adams announced a plan in November to hospitalize some severely mentally ill people involuntarily, citing the city’s “moral obligation to act.”
From Seattle Times ● May 10, 2023
I cannot get her out of this steel block unless I hospitalize her, perhaps operate.
From Sinister Paradise by Williams, Robert Moore
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
Still, asthma kills about 4,000 people a year and hospitalizes at least half a million.
From Seattle Times ● May 3, 2010
More than 90 people have been hospitalized as a result of the outbreak in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 31, 2026
Michigan has now recorded 10,077 cases, and at least 160 people have been hospitalized.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 30, 2026
Nearly 400 people have been hospitalized with measles in the U.S. this year and last, and three have died.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2026
While no deaths have been reported, 94 people have been hospitalized.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 17, 2026
He slid the needle into the forearm of a woman who’d recently been hospitalized for leukemia, then pushed the plunger, injecting about five million of Henrietta’s cells into her arm.
From "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
It is still killing roughly 1,000 Americans each week and hospitalizing even more.
From New York Times ● May 5, 2023
Last year, a sedan that had been struck by another car slammed into a homeless encampment in Koreatown, hospitalizing four people.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 4, 2022
World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Thursday that omicron infections should not be described as “mild”: “Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people, and it is killing people.”
From Washington Post ● Jan. 7, 2022
By the end of 2020, nearly 10% of Congress had contracted the coronavirus, temporarily hospitalizing at least two lawmakers and forcing a number of lawmakers to quarantine.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 2, 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.
