realize
See also: realizē
English
Alternative forms
- realise (non-Oxford British spelling)
Etymology
Attested since 1610, from French réaliser, from Middle French real (“actual”), from Old French reel, from Latin reālis, from rēs (“thing, event, deed, fact”); as if real + -ize.
Pronunciation
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈɹi.ə.laɪz/
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈɹɪə.laɪz/
Audio (US) (file) - Hyphenation: re‧al‧ize
Verb
realize (third-person singular simple present realizes, present participle realizing, simple past and past participle realized)
- (formal, transitive) To make real; to convert from the imaginary or fictitious into the actual; to bring into concrete existence
- Synonyms: accomplish, actualize, materialize
- (Can we date this quote?), Joseph Glanvill
- We realize what Archimedes had only in hypothesis, weighting a single grain against the globe of earth.
- The objectives of the project were never fully realized.
- (transitive) To become aware of a fact or situation.
- 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 4, in The Celebrity:
- No matter how early I came down, I would find him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or […] . And at last I began to realize in my harassed soul that all elusion was futile, and to take such holidays as I could get, when he was off with a girl, in a spirit of thankfulness.
- He realized that he had left his umbrella on the train.
- The defendant desperately yelled at her young daughter, frantic to make her realize what she had done.
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- (transitive) To cause to seem real; to feel vividly or strongly; to make one's own in apprehension or experience.
- 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, II:
- That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
- (Can we date this quote?), Benjamin Jowett.
- Many coincidences . . . soon begin to appear in them [Greek inscriptions] which realize ancient history to us.
- (Can we date this quote?), Sir William Hamilton
- We can not realize it in thought, that the object . . . had really no being at any past moment.
- 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, II:
- (transitive, business) To acquire as an actual possession; to obtain as the result of plans and efforts; to gain; to get
- (Can we date this quote?) Macaulay
- Knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by diligent thrift realize a good estate.
- to realize large profits from a speculation
- (Can we date this quote?) Macaulay
- (transitive, business, finance) To convert any kind of property into money, especially property representing investments, as shares, bonds, etc.
- (Can we date this quote?) Washington Irving
- Wary men took the alarm, and began to realize, a word now first brought into use to express the conversion of ideal property into something real.
- Profits from the investment can be realized at any time by selling the shares.
- By realizing the company's assets, the liquidator was able to return most of the shareholders' investments.
- (Can we date this quote?) Washington Irving
- (transitive, business, obsolete) To convert into real property; to make real estate of.
- (transitive, linguistics) To turn an abstract linguistic object into actual language, especially said of a phoneme's conversion into speech sound.
- The southern /v/ is realized as the voiced approximant [ʋ].
- 2016, Martin Maiden, The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford University Press (→ISBN), page 297:
- Many (probably most) speakers realize it as [ø] or [œ] in other contexts as well. In Midi French, schwa is realized more frequently than in northern varieties, including in word-final position, where it generally (but not always) corresponds to […]
Derived terms
Translations
to make real
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to become aware of
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to cause to seem real
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to convert into real property
to acquire as an actual possession
to convert into actual money
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to convert any kind of property into money
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References
- realize in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
- realize in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
Mauritian Creole
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ʁealize/
Portuguese
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