Word.ws English Dictionary

privatizing

privatizing is the present participle and gerund 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

Noun

privatizing (uncountable)

  1. privatization

Questions about privatizing

What does privatizing mean?
Privatizing means privatization.
What is privatizing the present participle and gerund of?
Privatizing is the present participle and gerund of privatize.
What part of speech is privatizing?
Privatizing is a noun.

Words near privatizing in the dictionary

  1. privatize
  2. privatized
  3. privatizer
  4. privatizers
  5. privatizes
  6. privatizing
  7. privatopia
  8. privatopian
  9. privatopias
  10. prived
  11. priveledge

Source and license

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