verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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summaristnoun
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summarizationnoun
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summarizernoun
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summarizableadjective
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unsummarizableadjective
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unsummarizedadjective
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well-summarizedadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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summarizesimple
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summarizessimple
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have summarizedperfect
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has summarizedperfect
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am summarizingprogressive
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are summarizingprogressive
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is summarizingprogressive
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have been summarizingperfect progressive
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has been summarizingperfect progressive
Past
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summarizedsimple
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had summarizedperfect
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was summarizingprogressive
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were summarizingprogressive
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had been summarizingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of summarize
Explanation
To summarize something, only include the important stuff. If your teacher asks you to summarize several events from the Civil War, she wants the important facts, not every single detail you can find. When you summarize something, you write or tell the general idea and only the most important points. It's a skill we often use in school or at work, but even in our personal lives, we summarize: like when a friend asks what the book you're reading is about, or someone wants to know about your recent vacation. You don't tell them every single detail, talking yourself to exhaustion. Instead, you summarize — describing just the key events that "sum up" the experience.
Vocabulary lists containing summarize
The SAT: Language of the Test, List 1
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The Language of Standardized Tests, List 1
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PARCC: Language of the Test (Grade7)
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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:
With half of 2026 having already flown by, it is time to summarize which stocks have performed best so far this year.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 30, 2026
The company said the suite of tools can give any agent —an AI which can work autonomously— the ability to synthesize and summarize scientific knowledge, evaluate results, and then reason and execute the next actions.
From Barron's ● Jun. 23, 2026
It has released new AI features that allow users to improve their writing, translate text, summarize messages and create images.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 8, 2026
Employees use it to summarize meetings, draft emails and generate first cuts of presentations.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 7, 2026
“Read the first two propositions, and then summarize them after dinner.”
From "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" by Gary D. Schmidt
Yeah, the skit you used of him saying “I’m just a man from the ghetto” on the song really summarizes that.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 17, 2026
"Based on these insights, this review summarizes the induction mechanisms of cellular senescence and the subsequent evolution of their functional phenotypes across diverse tissues."
From Science Daily ● May 22, 2026
Another file summarizes statements from seven federal government employees who separately reported "several unidentified anomalous phenomena" in the United States in 2023.
From Barron's ● May 8, 2026
And many traditional searches now produce an “AI Overview” that summarizes results at the top of the page.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 29, 2026
Table 5.1 summarizes, for these and other areas of local domestication, some of the best-known crops and animals and the earliest known dates of domestication.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
That behavior appears to conflict with Newton's third law, the famous action and reaction principle often summarized as "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
From Science Daily ● Jun. 16, 2026
This week, those values were best summarized by Christina Koch, one of the astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission to orbit the moon.
From Salon ● Apr. 8, 2026
Those allegations were summarized in a document prepared by the FBI last summer and in an FBI presentation of prominent names in the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases, the DOJ files show.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 25, 2026
The hearings are ostensibly intended to gather information, all of which will be summarized in a white paper being written by researchers at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 14, 2026
Researchers in different fields have summarized conclusions about the nature of music and culture after many years of observing human behavior and music.
From "Music and the Child" by Natalie Sarrazin
One Claude agent has been serving as a “builder” and another serves as an auditor, summarizing the work the first agent did.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 24, 2026
The White House typically releases physician-written memos summarizing presidential physicals, translating full medical records into condensed clinical findings for public release.
From Salon ● May 31, 2026
The idea is called “lifecording” — that there’s an abundance of hardware devices recording your life, with AI processing, summarizing, searching and finding insights and connections.
From MarketWatch ● May 11, 2026
It can read your Google Drive and write emails in Gmail, making it the best choice for summarizing your own files or integrating email correspondence.
From MarketWatch ● Mar. 25, 2026
Unfortunately, he died in 1461, before he could carry out the task, although he had begun a preliminary book summarizing the edition of the Almagest that was available.
From "The Scientists" by John Gribbin
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.
