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:
The camera darts between the lovers’ angry, exhausted faces in a flurry of slamming edits and chin-severing closeups, as if to literalize the idea that something between them has broken.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 7, 2022
After a recording session with Jay-Z in which West talks his way onto a song, Simmons prompts Jay-Z for a quote, asking him to literalize his co-sign of West for the camera.
From New York Times ● Feb. 17, 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
Whether we believe in literal fire or not, we certainly ought to ask for a reason for the Master's failure to literalize the figurative word "fire."
From The Great Doctrines of the Bible by William Evans
The metaphor of foreign policy as a chess game is literalized with a cartoon Kissinger eyeing cartoon chess pieces.
From Salon ● Nov. 1, 2025
And now, the virus had literalized that psychic vulnerability, made it lethal.
From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2020
And that idea is wonderfully literalized during Endgame’s time travel scenes.
From The Verge ● Apr. 29, 2019
What’s most fascinating about the Sixers is that they’ve literalized pro sports’ championship-or-bust mindset.
From Slate ● Nov. 19, 2014
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
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
The action is periodically distorted by wide-angle lenses, literalizing our sense of this ritualized world as an oversize fishbowl.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 22, 2019
The attraction obscures her view of the ocean, literalizing already narrow horizons, and casts deep, expressionistic blue and red light on the apartment’s dilapidated interior and its equally worn inhabitants.
From New York Times ● Nov. 30, 2017
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
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