substantify

Verb

substantify (third-person singular simple present substantifies, present participle substantifying, simple past and past participle substantified)

1. To give material form or substance to; to embody.
   • With the problems of theory domain and theory focus out of the way, we are now ready to design and set down an integrating construct which will substantify, hold together and make opertional the theoretical framework.1972, Maurice Goldsmith, The Predicament of man
   • Matthew tries to draw an analogy between the divine person and the divine nature: just as the infinite divine nature can be substantified in many divine persons, so the infinite divine person can substantify many created natures.2002, Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation
2. To reify or hypostatize; to treat something that is fluid or abstract as a static entity without regard to nuance or change in character.
   • It is partly because almost inevitably a word, referring to a vague intimation of reality, tends to substantify and reify the insight with time.1966, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association
   • I think that Aristotle may have noticed that pressing the question "When is Y a potential X?" seemed to "substantify" accidental states of bodies, and dimly saw that if one once began to chop up the realm of the indefinite into quasi-unities one would be well on the road to, as we would put it, a...1999, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, page 52
3. To endow with a consciousness, will, motivation and independent existence; to give life to; to hypostatize.
   • having reduced the intensity and complexity of His life and Love to bring into existence the upper reaches of the spiritual universe (spiritual substances and atmospheres), then with diminished intensity the lower reaches (forces and motions), until through them He was able to breathe life into...1980, John Ward, The social and religious plays of Strindberg, page 118
   • We see that the refusal to “substantify” particular beings reduces them to mere functions, types of activity, beingless things; for example, when the occupant of a hotel-room is designated by his room-number, when human beings — wife, child, servant - are treated merely pragmatically, for their...1995, Seymour Cain, Gabriel Marcel's Theory of Religious Experience, page 150
4. (rare) To transform into or treat syntactically as a noun; to make into or use as a substantive.
   • They are, in fact, equivalent to the infinitive which some languages substantify directly (das Rennen, das Sprechen, le manger, le boire, le dormir).1913, Arnold Ruge, Wilhelm Windelband, Josiah Royce, Logic - Volume 1, page 194
   • Lexical items are more or less the accidental results of transformations which substantify, or 'incorporate', the trees referred to in (i), or constituent parts ('subtrees') of them, into entities which, for reasons of practical economy are labelled with single lexical items.1974, John Mathieson Anderson, Charles Jones, Historical linguistics, page 381