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:
Flahive: There’s something about being forced to externalize things and literalize things that actually made certain things feel bigger in a way that was exciting and allowed you to be a little bit more playful.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 19, 2022
Is it too much to expect that a show about the difficulty of deciding between the light and the dark would, I dunno, literalize that conflict with a swoony bad influence?
From Slate ● Oct. 25, 2018
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
“The Whispers” throws in marital drama, nuclear sabotage and the F.B.I., and it has to literalize the invaders, who now manipulate electricity and can snatch a fighter jet out of the sky.
From New York Times ● May 31, 2015
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
This staging is like a theater troupe’s show, Wotan’s schemes literalized as puppeteering.
From New York Times ● Feb. 26, 2020
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
The first was Lolita, a hollow, literalized adaptation of the book, for which it can be said only that it wore basic black before black comedy was fashionable.
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
One of the funniest sight gags sees him crash-landing, desk and all, into the homes of the people he’s cold-calling, brilliantly literalizing the intrusiveness of his job.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 5, 2018
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
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.
