metabolize
Americanverb (used with or without object)
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
metabolizesimple
-
metabolizessimple
-
have metabolizedperfect
-
has metabolizedperfect
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am metabolizingprogressive
-
are metabolizingprogressive
-
is metabolizingprogressive
-
have been metabolizingperfect progressive
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has been metabolizingperfect progressive
Past
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metabolizedsimple
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had metabolizedperfect
-
was metabolizingprogressive
-
were metabolizingprogressive
-
had been metabolizingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of metabolize
First recorded in 1885–90; metabol(ism) + -ize
Explanation
When bodies process various substances, you can say they metabolize them. For example, when your body takes in calories, it metabolizes them, putting them to good use. This verb, a back-formation from metabolism, is pretty much the sine qua non — or essential element — of being alive: it's everyone's 24/7 occupation. The Greek root, metabole, only means "a change," which is the one thing that's inescapable while we go about in this mortal coil.
Vocabulary lists containing metabolize
Ecology - Middle School
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Ecology - High School
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Cosmos
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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:
“We all metabolize caffeine at different speeds,” Marcus said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 20, 2026
Age matters because children have smaller, less developed livers that metabolize caffeine more slowly.
From Science Daily ● May 18, 2026
Movies, for better or worse, are among the few remaining ways for Americans to encounter, metabolize, and wrestle with big moral issues at scale.
From Slate ● Mar. 13, 2026
Side effects could be more severe for older adults, who metabolize medicine differently than younger people.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 4, 2025
His job, it seemed, was to take the chaos and metabolize it somehow into calm leadership—every day of the week, every week of the year.
From "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
"As the body metabolizes the rapamycin, the two fragments disjoin, deactivating the system."
From Science Daily ● Sep. 21, 2023
Day after day, year after year, that repetitive exposure to the mainstream metabolizes in you until you’re irrevocably changed.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 18, 2023
As the liver metabolizes vinyl chloride, it spits out a chemical called chloroethylene oxide, which subsequently binds to our DNA, essentially vandalizing it and increasing the risk of tumor formation.
From Salon ● Feb. 15, 2023
One limitation with Paxlovid is that the active ingredient is given alongside another drug that reduces how fast the body metabolizes it, and this can also affect other drugs a patient is on.
From Scientific American ● Feb. 8, 2023
"Oh, it metabolizes, all right, but you'd better find yourself another axiom, pretty quick."
From Contamination Crew by Nourse, Alan Edward
The pill’s active ingredient, orforglipron, is primarily metabolized by the liver.
From Barron's ● May 4, 2026
“Most of it doesn’t get metabolized, meaning that we don’t extract energy from it, and it passes through and is excreted in the stool,” Fetter said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 24, 2026
"As we get a better grasp on identifying and measuring these diverse circulating molecules in our bodies and how they're metabolized, we could make huge strides in personalizing medicine accordingly," says Metallo.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 18, 2024
Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose are not metabolized by the human body so they are excreted – this is what makes them low-calorie sugar alternatives.
From Salon ● Jul. 17, 2024
On examination his fat was found to contain stored dieldrin, which had been metabolized as he lost weight.
From "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson
"It takes away from food production as energy is diverted to metabolizing the toxin. Our goal was to reduce the amount of wasted energy by bypassing the plant's original photorespiratory pathway."
From Science Daily ● Dec. 4, 2024
Surely it is possible for a living entity to be immortal, sentient, distinct from its environment, metabolizing and even moving around without necessarily having to reproduce.
From Scientific American ● May 28, 2023
To this day people can still mimic Catherine O'Hara's showstopping lip-synch without metabolizing the song's meaning.
From Salon ● Apr. 26, 2023
The primary way that medical professionals treat people who have taken the chemicals is by giving them a drug, fomepizole, that prevents the body from metabolizing them, said Leo Schep, a toxicologist in New Zealand.
From New York Times ● Oct. 21, 2022
First, when Martian soil was mixed with a sterile organic soup from Earth, something in the soil chemically broke down the soup—almost as if there were respiring microbes metabolizing a food package from Earth.
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
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.
