literalize
Americanverb (used with object)
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of literalize
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:
And as if to literalize this, the Light Phone III even has a small clickable wheel on one side that brightens or dims the screen, and engages a flashlight if depressed.
From Slate ● Apr. 17, 2025
In her revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Piano Lesson,” LaTanya Richardson Jackson decided to literalize the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter.
From New York Times ● Dec. 6, 2022
The camera darts between the lovers’ angry, exhausted faces in a flurry of slamming edits and chin-severing closeups, as if to literalize the idea that something between them has broken.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 7, 2022
Something about Knott froze in childhood, leaving a body of work marked by the child’s tendency to literalize imaginative schemes.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 27, 2017
He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined.
From The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic
The metaphor of foreign policy as a chess game is literalized with a cartoon Kissinger eyeing cartoon chess pieces.
From Salon ● Nov. 1, 2025
Mac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator.
From New York Times ● Jan. 20, 2022
And that idea is wonderfully literalized during Endgame’s time travel scenes.
From The Verge ● Apr. 29, 2019
Competition among the women on the show isn’t literalized in the form of elimination rounds, but it does play out in the now-familiar reality TV language of catty exchanges and wounded reaction shots.
From Slate ● Aug. 13, 2012
Nevertheless, pressure groups have seized on the music's theatrical excessiveness, literalized it, then tried to get all of rock to take the rap.
From Time Magazine Archive
The best dystopias extrapolate issues in our society and make us see them more clearly by literalizing their metaphorical conceits.
From New York Times ● Nov. 1, 2022
Another show launched with a terrifying quote that gets to the heart of this, but "Westworld" fine-tunes it by literalizing how easily we accept falsehoods as real.
From Salon ● Jun. 26, 2022
“Courage Hats” wants a little too forcefully to guide us into “deep” places where we will doff our hidey-hats to reveal our true selves — abstract concepts for the literalizing peewee set.
From New York Times ● May 20, 2022
The action is periodically distorted by wide-angle lenses, literalizing our sense of this ritualized world as an oversize fishbowl.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 22, 2019
But by literalizing this fact—by making print books the antidote for an actual disease—“The Word Exchange” comes dangerously close to arguing for literature as medicine.
From The New Yorker ● May 27, 2014
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