literatize

English

Alternative forms

• literatise

Etymology 1

literate +‎ -ize

Verb

literatize (third-person singular simple present literatizes, present participle literatizing, simple past and past participle literatized)

1. To make literate; to introduce or increase the incidence of reading and writing.
   • 1990, Late Imperial China - Volume 11, Issues 1-2, page 120:

     On the whole, the militia leaders were members of wealthy local families, many of them somewhat literatized, who seem to have been trying to hold on to their local power, ...

   • 2000, Forests, Trees, and People Newsletter - Issues 43-46, page 11:

     Books function as our extemal memory devices, and with them the need to exercise our intemal memories dwindles; something which has been noticed in recently literatized Inuit culture.

   • 2008, Siegwart Reichwald, Mendelssohn in Performance, page 6:

     Pragmatic factors favored this: better education to literacy; expansion of publishing; the propagation of reading rooms and libraries, and of the culture of coffe houses, which supplied a wide range of journals; the enormous increase of writing; and the appearance of book peddlers, who helped to literatize even rural areas.

Etymology 2

literature +‎ -ize

Verb

literatize (third-person singular simple present literatizes, present participle literatizing, simple past and past participle literatized)

1. To create a body of literature about; to make into a subject that is studied through reading about it.
   • 1922, Prosser Hall Frye, Romance & Tragedy, page 74:

     As for so many other of our vices we are indebted to them too for the disposition to "literatize" and " articize " life.

   • 1988, Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, page 169:

     The attempt to "literatize" other disciplines is often made by those thinkers in them who have been most receptive and yet most threatened by the invasion of what is often called "continental" theory and by Marxism.

   • 2019, Virginie Magnat, The Performative Power of Vocality:

     I would further suggest that by granting sight pre-eminence over sound and correlating the visual with discursive language, these influential theorists are attempting to literatize embodiment, whose physical manifestations are observed and analyzed through a visualist and scriptocentric theoretical lens that disregards and potentially disavows the sensually experienced non-visual materiality and non-discursive sonic/phonic performative power of vocality.

2. To make literary; to write using a literary style
   • 1967, Galaxy Magazine - Volume 26, page 159:

     Self-conscious, saddled with primerous blurbs and introductory matter, it is so sophisticated, so scrupulous in crediting even the supplier who manufactures the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award tokens (sic), that it resembles some kind of grotesque attempt to literatize a corporate statement.

   • 1991, Ewa M. Thompson, The Search for Self-Definition in Russian Literature, page 76:

     Perhaps in our technotronic age the importance of literature as such has receded, but as it has withdrawn film and video and television have been highly literatized.

   • 2012, Guillermo Bartelt, Bärbel Treichel, Don Decker’s Apache Odyssey:

     But at the same time this style of rendering is artistically literatized in a language of personal observation dealing with the common experiences of one's former we-community from the point of view of the child and adolescent who would like to learn about the mysteries of the we-community which he is born into.

   • 2020, Jean-Luc Fournet, The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity, page 16:

     Admittedly, we can ask whether the graphic style of Coptic is motivated by a usage that was originally exclusively literary, or by the fact that Coptic started to be employed, in the domain of documents, exclusively for private epistolography (as we are going to see in greater detail), at a time when the trend was to “literatize” the writing of private letters.

3. To engage in literary pursuits; to read and write literature.
   • 1867 November, “Busy Brains”, in The Atlantic Monthly, volume 20, number 121, page 581:

     He says of himself in a letter to a friend: "I literatize away the morning, ride at three, go to bathe at five, dine at six, and get through the evening as I best may, sometimes by correcting a proof.”

   • 1895, Frances Aymar Mathews, “A Confession of Success”, in Godey's Magazine, volume 131, page 384:

     I neither rode recklessly, flirted desperately, carried clothes imperially, turned men's heads, broke their hearts, sang divinely, athletized, literatized, antagonized, nor hypnotized.

   • 1996, La Solidaridad - Volume 4, page 269:

     Well then, if not, we see a maligned Clarin pretending to be a literary man, because the readers will know that this man is allowed to “literatize” without need of pointers.