verb
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to tell, study, or explain (myths)
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(intr) to create or make up myths
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(tr) to convert into a myth
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of mythologize
1595–1605; mytholog(y) + -ize; compare French mythologiser
Explanation
To mythologize is to turn an event into a myth, especially by exaggerating it. Some parents mythologize the story of their child's birth, telling it again and again until it becomes a well-known story. When you talk about the past, or some incident or experience from your life, you can mythologize it by making it slightly more exciting and interesting, and by re-telling the tale over and over. An actual myth becomes well-known through repetition by many people over many years (generations, even). To turn an ordinary event into something of a myth is to mythologize it. The word comes from the Greek mythos, "story, speech, or anything delivered by word of mouth."
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:
“Lila is complicated, to say the least. She has a great tendency to mythologize her life—not fabricate, and there’s a difference.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 16, 2026
Although they had already sought to mythologize in the past the supposedly noble sacrifice of Nazi activists killed in street fighting, Wessel was the first to be elevated to supreme martyr status.
From Salon ● Sep. 28, 2025
Adriana Romanko, a psychotherapist who leads a volunteer group that supplies the military, UAID, said it was natural for an embattled society to mythologize its defenders in a fight for survival.
From Reuters ● Oct. 4, 2023
I think as writers, we mythologize these places where we don’t live.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 21, 2022
Gardeners ourselves by birthright, we also mythologize and plant our Edens in the East of us, like our ancestors; the sacredness of earth and heaven still clinging to the tiller of the ground.
From Tablets by Alcott, Amos Bronson
“A mythologized Disraeli,” Ms. Jones writes, “provided political, literary and intellectual means by which Toryism could be positioned against an increasingly demonized ‘Victorian Liberalism.’”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 12, 2026
It has been admired, criticized, mythologized and blamed in equal measure.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 30, 2026
Nabokov set an impossible mark for himself and hit it, the literary equivalent of Babe Ruth’s called shot, and his book deserves to be mythologized in similar fashion.
From Salon ● Dec. 18, 2025
The most mythologized humans in our culture all died young, suddenly or violently: Elvis, Marilyn, James Dean, Abraham, Martin and John.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 22, 2023
But among white Texans they were widely mythologized.
From "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann
Answers unfold in three chronological sections containing nearly 280 objects that position samurai as “global icons,” the product of mythologizing at home as much as abroad.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 7, 2026
The mystery, along with Lightfoot’s mournful and eminently meme-able dirge, created fertile soil for a cultural resurgence today—one driven largely by Gen Z and millennials who love mythologizing working-class tragedies and Midwestern nostalgia.
From Slate ● Nov. 10, 2025
If that message is tough for some people to absorb, consider the pie mythologizing that’s been baked into our national story.
From Salon ● Jun. 19, 2025
But Linklater is quick to puncture that mythologizing.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 7, 2024
And the process of mythologizing Bobby commenced in earnest.
From "Endgame" by Frank Brady
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.
