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Showing results for spiritualize. Search instead for spiritualizing.
Synonyms

spiritualize

American  
[spir-i-choo-uh-lahyz] / ˈspɪr ɪ tʃu əˌlaɪz /
especially British, spiritualise

verb (used with object)

spiritualized, spiritualizing
  1. to make spiritual.

  2. to invest with a spiritual meaning.


spiritualize British  
/ ˈspɪrɪtjʊəˌlaɪz /

verb

  1. (tr) to make spiritual or infuse with spiritual content

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Etymology

Origin of spiritualize

First recorded in 1625–35; spiritual + -ize

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:

Though I admit, I myself am tempted to spiritualize decomposition.

From New York Times Mar. 31, 2018

Skeptical of progress, Cole painted the landscape as Arcadia, which served to spiritualize the past in a land without antique monuments.

From Time Magazine Archive

It also did so on a grander scale, binding an immense continent with tracks and producing trains of such magnificence that they moved Nathaniel Hawthorne to exclaim: "They spiritualize travel!"

From Time Magazine Archive

In a country without antique monuments, the image of Arcadia serves to spiritualize the past.

From Time Magazine Archive

But I am just as ready to spiritualize it as he is, provided I am sure first that we understand it.

From Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work by Ruskin, John

This production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” seems like a gift from the other side, that mysterious, creative realm where history is spiritualized.

From Los Angeles Times Nov. 1, 2025

We swam together in spiritualized gaslighting, grasping for a life that ought to be enough.

From Salon May 7, 2022

Maybe they grew rapidly because her suffering was spiritualized away.

From Salon May 7, 2022

When he says, "Every spiritualized state grows out of what was originally a non-spiritual one," he is thinking of some sudden stepping-up of the state rather than the slow process called growth.

From Time Magazine Archive

Scepticism indeed persuades itself that the whole story is to be spiritualized, the twelve baskets answering to the twelve apostles who distributed the Bread of Life, and the seven to the seven deacons.

From The Gospel According to St. Mark by Chadwick, G. A.

Catholicism has given Waugh the unifying influence and the spiritualizing force whose workings are evident in Brideshead.

From Time Magazine Archive

From this we gather that none of those ancient men knew anything of the modern system of spiritualizing.

From A Voice of Warning An introduction to the faith and doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Pratt, Parley P.

There was no sentimentalism in it; it was the spirit of Jesus spiritualizing and transforming and extending the natural instinct of brotherliness by making it theocentric.

From The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire by Glover, T. R. (Terrot Reaveley)

In the field of theistic conception the propædeutic office of Grecian philosophy is seen-- I. In the release of the popular mind from Polytheistic notion, and the purifying and spiritualizing of the Theistic idea.

From Christianity and Greek Philosophy or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles by Cocker, B. F. (Benjamin Franklin)

The spiritualizing influence of the school as a social unit is, however, not confined to the classroom.

From The Teacher Essays and Addresses on Education by Palmer, Alice Freeman

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