Word.ws English Dictionary

operationalizing

operationalizing is the present participle and gerund of operationalize.

Meaning of operationalize

Verb

operationalize (third-person singular simple present operationalizes, present participle operationalizing, simple past and past participle operationalized)

  1. (transitive) To make operational.
    • I have a lot of sexual fantasies that I'm never going to operationalize. I enjoy them just as fantasies.1981 August 15, Nancy Wechsler, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, “Sadomasochism: Fears, Facts, Fantasies”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 5, page 6
  2. (transitive) To define (a concept) in such a way that it can be practically measured.
    • To operationalize a concept is to identify those variables in terms of which the phenomenon represented by the concept can be accurately observed.1956, Ernest Greenwood, “New Directions in Delinquency Research: A Commentary on a Study by Bernard Lander”, in Social Service Review, volume 30, number 2, page 152

Questions about operationalizing

What is operationalizing the present participle and gerund of?
Operationalizing is the present participle and gerund of operationalize.

Words near operationalizing in the dictionary

  1. operationalization
  2. operationalizations
  3. operationalize
  4. operationalized
  5. operationalizes
  6. operationalizing
  7. operationally
  8. operationism
  9. operationisms
  10. operationist
  11. operationistic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: operationalizing (page history and authors); operationalize (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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