Word.ws English Dictionary

privatized

privatized is the simple past and past participle of privatize.

Meaning of privatize

Verb

privatize (third-person singular simple present privatizes, present participle privatizing, simple past and past participle privatized)

  1. (British, English, Oxford, US) To release government control (of a business or industry) to private industry.
    Synonyms:
    denationalize
  2. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive) To render (a variable, etc.) private in scope.
    • If the compiler allocates a privatized variable to a register, it must examine whether the variable is live after the termination of the while-loop.1997, David Sehr, Utpal Banerjee, David Gelernter, Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing: 9th International Workshop, page 184
  3. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive, uncommon) To render a thought or an idea, private in scope.
    • The neoliberal, privatizing version of health in which everyone is responsible for themselves, despite disparities in resources.2018, Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, page 129

Questions about privatized

What is privatized the simple past and past participle of?
Privatized is the simple past and past participle of privatize.

Words near privatized in the dictionary

  1. privatives
  2. privatizable
  3. privatization
  4. privatizations
  5. privatize
  6. privatized
  7. privatizer
  8. privatizers
  9. privatizes
  10. privatizing
  11. privatopia

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: privatized (page history and authors); privatize (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: “privatized.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/privatized. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.