canalize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make a canal or canals through.
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to convert into a canal.
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to divide (a stream) into reaches with locks or dams, usually to maintain navigable depths.
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to divert into certain channels; give a certain direction to or provide a certain outlet for.
verb
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to provide with or convert into a canal or canals
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to give a particular direction to or provide an outlet for; channel
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to divide a channel into separate reaches controlled by dams and weirs to aid navigation, control water levels, generate power, etc
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of canalize
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:
Making music, “you are away, somehow, from real tragedies, but you can canalize everything that you are feeling and suffering from into something that becomes a moment,” Tanja continued.
From New York Times ● Feb. 2, 2023
Some became conscious of the role a state could play in intervening in the economy in order to curb and canalize democracy.
From Slate ● Apr. 7, 2017
To have peace, the nations must forgo the urge to canalize to fixed ends the productive energies of private citizens.
From Time Magazine Archive
They also went into shelf hardware, planned to establish retail stores to canalize large production.
From Time Magazine Archive
What is important is that as life goes on, necessity, the social organization and gradual concentration of energy canalize the purposes, reduce the power of the irrelevant and temporary desires.
From The Foundations of Personality by Myerson, Abraham
Our polluted, chopped up, canalized, dammed and damned rivers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 7, 2020
They do this to restore, to the fullest extent possible, the habitats of and —to put the natural curves back in canalized rivers, for instance, so the waters can flow as they once did.
From Scientific American ● Feb. 15, 2013
Into these cisterns they evidently canalized the rains, which descended by a trough from the hills and of which the supply was undoubtedly scant.
From The New Yorker ● May 6, 1955
Its avenues of attack canalized by a water-broken country, the Armored Force ran into traps, anti-tank posts.
From Time Magazine Archive
It would have rendered the heresies ridiculous in turn, it would have canalized the exaltations, it would have humanized the discoveries.
From Europe and the Faith "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" by Belloc, Hilaire
He had swum with the tide of public sentiment in cardinal matters, instead of stemming or canalizing and guiding it.
From The Inside Story of the Peace Conference by Dillon, Emile Joseph
It is important to turn them from these in order to tranquilize and regulate their course by damming them up and canalizing them.
From The Sexual Question A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study by Forel, Auguste
It must be remembered that before the canalizing of the Thames the influence of the tide was perceptible at least as high as Staines, where was also a crossing-place of immemorial antiquity.
From Early Britain—Roman Britain by Conybeare, Edward
Twenty-five years of mistakes, miscalculations, improvidence, hundreds of millions thrown away, in the great work of canalizing the country, have proved it to the most incredulous.
From System of Economical Contradictions; or, the Philosophy of Misery by Proudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Slowly and patiently they are canalizing the spirit that at once directs, energizes and safeguards its operation.
From Messages to America by Shoghi Effendi
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.
