melodramatize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make melodramatic.
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to turn (a novel, story, etc.) into a melodrama.
verb
Etymology
Origin of melodramatize
First recorded in 1810–20; melodrama + (drama)tize
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:
It would have been a simple matter to melodramatize or caricature these soldiers' stories.
From Time Magazine Archive
The film's strength is its refusal to melodramatize a situation whose inherent horror needs no melodrama.
From Time Magazine Archive
O. Henry came very near to her, but did he not melodramatize her a little, sometimes cheapen her by his epigrammatic appraisal, fit her too neatly into his plot?
From Pipefuls by Morley, Christopher
Paradoxically, at virtually the same time, the many stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which dramatized, or melodramatized, the brutality of slavery, were an enduring sensation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026
But his greatest enmity is reserved for the television correspondents who overpublicized and melodramatized ten young men and their "monstrous international dilemma."
From Time Magazine Archive
He has melodramatized the art, introduced in it a species of false, theatrical, personal feeling, quite foreign to its nature.
From Old Fogy His Musical Opinions and Grotesques by Huneker, James
A few of the plays were acted, one being melodramatized, but none proved effective.
From Tragedy by Thorndike, Ashley H.
One sort was swanking and swaggering, in which the writer unconsciously melodramatized himself, and the other was cynical, in which the writer betrayed the fact that he was afraid of being melodramatic.
From The A.E.F. With General Pershing and the American Forces by Broun, Heywood
Sayles also has a gift for showing, without bloodily melodramatizing it, the strangeness lurking beneath the bland surfaces of American life.
From Time Magazine Archive
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.
