adjectify

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English[edit]

Verb[edit]

adjectify (third-person singular simple present adjectifies, present participle adjectifying, simple past and past participle adjectified)

  1. To convert (a word that is not an adjective) into an adjective
    • 1800, “The Trial and Condemnation of Lengthy”, in The Monthly Magazine, and American Review, for the Year 1800: From July to December Inclusive, volume III, New York: […] T. & J. Swords, page 172:
      It is remarkable of words denoting dimension, that they all are abstracted into names by subjoining th, as length, breadth, width, and depth, and that these are not ordinarily allowed to be adjectified by adding either y or full.
    • 1862, M[ar]ie. C[har]les. Pandosy, translated by George Gibbs and J[ohn] G[ilmary] Shea, Grammar and Dictionary of the Yakama Language (Shea’s Library of American Linguistics; VI), New York: Cramoisy Press, page 14:
      If we desire to affirm that the substantive is put in action, we adjectify it by adding to its positive the termination tla; for example atawit, love; adjective affirming action atawit-la, loving.
    • 2012, Rory Pilossof, The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from Zimbabwe, UCT Press; Weaver Press, page 186:
      Wiles’ title – Foredoomed is my Forest: The Diary of a Zimbabwe [sic] Farmer – is problematic for another reason. He may not use Africa, but his failure to ‘adjectify’ Zimbabwe is an all too obvious reflection on the quality and content of the rest of the book.
    • 2014, Cécile Rozuel, “Otherness in Self and Organisations: Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Stir Moral Reflection”, in Michael Schwartz, Howard Harris, editors, The Contribution of Fiction to Organizational Ethics (Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations; volume 11), Emerald Group Publishing, page 26:
      The influence of Kafka on popular culture is undeniable, whether people have read his books or not. He is one of a few authors who have had their names adjectified. Situations or organisations are called ‘kafkaesque’ to denounce an absurdly painful series of events or experiences usually set in or involving a bureaucratic organisation (see for instance Hodson, Roscigno, Martin, & Lopez, 2013).
  2. To describe something
    • 1933 June 6, “Barbara Gould Reveals Her Secrets Of Feminine Beauty at Wasson’s Store”, in The Indianapolis Star, volume 31, number 1, page 7:
      She adjectifies the teens as “iridescent,” the twenties as “glowing,” the thirties as “warning” and the forties as “triumphant.”
    • 1936, Time, volume XXVIII, page 6:
      Adjectifying the “lower” animals to describe dastardly conduct on the part of “Superior” animals is always incorrect because the lower animals never act in a dastardly fashion.
    • 1986, Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein”, in Susan Rubin Suleiman, editor, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 40:
      However, since Moers’s work in the mid-1970s, attempts to adjectify Stein’s work as “female” have entangled that work far more deeply with Stein’s femaleness as femaleness, as an elemental condition, inseparable from the body.
    • 1993, D. Stephen Long, Tragedy, Tradition, Transformism: The Ethics Of Paul Ramsey, Westview Press, Inc., →ISBN, page 88:
      Niebuhr “adjectifies” love in terms of self-sacrifice and thus “gains too easy a victory, and by a somewhat mistaken strategy, in his campaign to demonstrate the (relevant) impossibility of love.”
    • 1994, Communication Arts, page 30:
      Like so many other designers, she hates being objectified, or rather adjectified, as a “woman” designer.
    • 2001, Joel Herscovitch, “Prime Time (Return of the Vampire)”, in Back to the Garden, Xlibris, pages 298–299:
      […]; he was already feeling adjectified to death.
    • 2012, Diane Awerbuck, Home Remedies, Umuzi, →ISBN:
      It pleased her to see minibuses named like racehorses, adjectified, and always with more exclamation marks than they could use in one go: wifey! or sexy boyz!! or rock of ages ii!! And Joanna’s favourite: untouchable!!!
    • 2014, Décio Torres Cruz, Postmodern Metanarratives: Blade Runner and Literature in the Age of Image, Palgrave Macmillan:
      By using the word “postmodern” before “metanarratives”, however, I intend to adjectify my focus and delimit it to a time period, and not classify all metanarratives as postmodern.
    • 2015, Iris van der Tuin, “Classifixation in Feminist Theory”, in Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach, Lexington Books, →ISBN, page 23:
      From a historical perspective, the relation is seen differently: with the conceptualization of the adjectified subject—the woman subject, the feminist subject, the black subject, the postcolonial subject, etc.
    • 2017, Limin Hee, Constructing Singapore Public Space (Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements), Springer Science+Business Media Singapore, →ISBN, page 212:
      A biophilic, smart Singapore will remain just another ‘adjectified city’ without buy-in from residents, or if they are unequipped with the know-how on how to take advantage of these upgrades.

Synonyms[edit]

Related terms[edit]

See also[edit]

(converting into or using as another part of speech:)

References[edit]

  • Robert Hartwell Fiske (2011) Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable English: A Compendium of Mistakes in Grammar, Usage, and Spelling with Commentary on Lexicographers and Linguists, Scribner, →ISBN, page 28: “adjectify Misused for describe (or similar words).”
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