Word.ws English Dictionary

morphologize

morphologize verb: to make (something) morphological (structural).

Verb

morphologize (third-person singular simple present morphologizes, present participle morphologizing, simple past and past participle morphologized)

  1. (transitive, uncommon) To make (something) morphological (structural).
    • By morphologizing the tribade, anatomy paradoxically moves her closer to home: the erotic excess that was attributed to foreign women now can be found on the Christian bodies of "Lasses" and "young Wenches" who handle themselves as well as each other.2002, Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, →ISBN, page 209
  2. (ambitransitive) To become, or cause (e.g. a phonetic feature) to become, (re)interpreted morphologically.
    • […] and, moreover, it is subject to syntagmatic segmental processes which can morphologize the prosodic accent location (vowel lengthening as in the first three examples and rearticulation of the secondary stressed vowel as in the fourth).1996, Bernhard Hurch, Richard A. Rhodes, Natural Phonology, →ISBN, page 85
  3. (ambitransitive) To decompose into morphemes (as).
    • In the word chlekʼwnts 'he broiled it (salmon)' which morphologizes as /č - lekʼʷ - ənts/ 'on - piece - 3.s.sub.3.s.obj.TRANS.-PAST', we have the processual 'pierce' as trajector, […]1993, Roy H. Ogawa, Gary B. Palmer, “Langacker semantics for three Coeur d'Alene prefixes”, in Issues in Cognitive Linguistics: 1993, page 172

Forms of morphologize

third-person singular presentmorphologizes
present participlemorphologizing
past participlemorphologized
pastmorphologized

Origin of morphologize

From morpholog(y), morpholog(ical) + -ize.

Questions about morphologize

What does morphologize mean?
Morphologize means to make (something) morphological (structural).
What part of speech is morphologize?
Morphologize is a verb.
What is the past tense of morphologize?
The past tense of morphologize is morphologized.

Words near morphologize in the dictionary

  1. morphologisation
  2. morphologist
  3. morphologists
  4. morphologization
  5. morphologizations
  6. morphologize
  7. morphologized
  8. morphologizes
  9. morphologizing
  10. morphology
  11. morpholomics

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: morphologize (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: “morphologize.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/morphologize. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.