Word.ws English Dictionary

dereify

dereify verb: to cause no longer to be a single coherent entity; to cease to treat as a recognizable object.

Verb

dereify (third-person singular simple present dereifies, present participle dereifying, simple past and past participle dereified)

  1. (transitive) To cause no longer to be a single coherent entity; to cease to treat as a recognizable object.
    • That is, although the insurrectionary consciousness of Antiguan workers is not identical with its African counterpart, it, too, is unable to dereify the social totality and reveal society as a collectively manageable entity.1996, Paget Henry, Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, page 247
    • [Hayek] seeks to dereify society as nothing more than individuals and seeks the dethronement of society so that markets and morals may resume their pure and rightful place. However, the state is neither the source nor the enforcer of morality-…2019, Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, page 103

Forms of dereify

third-person singular presentdereifies
present participledereifying
past participledereified
pastdereified

Origin of dereify

From de- + reify.

Words formed from dereify

Questions about dereify

What does dereify mean?
Dereify means to cause no longer to be a single coherent entity; to cease to treat as a recognizable object.
What part of speech is dereify?
Dereify is a verb.
What is the past tense of dereify?
The past tense of dereify is dereified.

Words near dereify in the dictionary

  1. Dereham
  2. dereification
  3. dereifications
  4. dereified
  5. dereifies
  6. dereify
  7. dereifying
  8. dereism
  9. dereistic
  10. Derek
  11. derelict

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dereify (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dereify.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dereify. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.