ironize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make ironical.
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to add iron (to a substance).
verb (used without object)
verb
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(intr) to use or indulge in irony
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(tr) to make ironic or use ironically
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of ironize
First recorded in 1635–45; from Greek eirōnízesthai “to pretend ignorance, dissemble, understate; treat with sarcasm”; see origin at irony 1 ( def. ), -ize ( def. )
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:
My self-deprecating commentary—“nothing more embarrassing than being complimented on your Twitter thread”—never quite manages to ironize itself out of what it is: a plea for attention among infinite other pleas for attention.
From The Verge ● Sep. 12, 2018
I suppose its general intent is to serve for a woman who wants to distinguish, and perhaps to ironize, her participation in the entrenched trend of military wear by professing unconcern with style.
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 21, 2018
We have become used to titles that ironize or undercut what we are looking at, providing conceptual scaffolding for feeble visual ideas, or weak punch lines to duller jokes.
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 12, 2017
In Teutonic techno pokerface, the track makes Kraftwerk-like fun of smartphone marketing, a definite nose-tweak to Ocean’s sponsors at Apple, serving to ironize and queer the very medium that’s delivering the music.
From Slate ● Aug. 22, 2016
To casually and sloppily take down, to ironize, to sneer comes very naturally to us, we can do it in our sleep, but to care, to try, to want, are harder.
From Slate ● Oct. 27, 2011
His 2000 debut, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” was a lightly fictionalized memoir that introduced readers to Eggers’ ironized yet deeply moving storytelling.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 14, 2025
That’s probably truest of the second movement, which has this “Rosenkavalier”-like, ironized waltz.
From New York Times ● Jan. 31, 2024
What was cynical and ironized, at the start, becomes earnest, direct, vulnerable, even hopeful.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 9, 2019
Few had bothered to consider that the original tweet was nothing but the sort of stupid, ironized joke that savvy Twitter users major in.
From Salon ● May 7, 2017
Shooting herself in character as B-movie archetypes and ironized fashion icons, old masters and grand dames, she is a hall-of-fame conceptualist.
From Slate ● Feb. 27, 2012
He had both an absolute commitment to what a line required and a way of gently ironizing that line.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 3, 2023
But Osunde is also irreverent, casting a critical, ironizing eye on those who are both religious and powerful.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 20, 2022
“To me, these girls are ironizing the whole question of power. Do they have it, don’t they have it, what is it to have it, and does it matter?” he says.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 4, 2019
If Roy Lichtenstein took pulp comics into the gallery, ironizing and domesticating their tropes for an audience of connoisseurs, 7 Miles a Second inverts the process.
From Slate ● Mar. 1, 2013
The bounder must have known, as he sat smoking his cigar and ironizing on the ruins of empires, that the safe and settled little world to which they both belonged was already in a blaze.
From The Best Short Stories of 1917 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story by O'Brien, Edward J. (Edward Joseph Harrington)
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.
