realize

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[edit] English

Part or all of this page has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.

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[edit] Verb

Infinitive
to realize

Third person singular
realizes

Simple past
realized

Past participle
realized

Present participle
realizing

to realize (third-person singular simple present realizes, present participle realizing, simple past and past participle realized)

  1. (transitive) To become aware of a fact or situation.
    • He realized that he had left his umbrella on the train.
  2. (transitive) To make real; to convert from the imaginary or fictitious into the actual; to bring into concrete existence; to accomplish.
    • The objectives of the project were never fully realized.
    • Profits from the investment can be realized at any time by selling the shares.
    • We realize what Archimedes had only in hypothesis, weighting a single grain against the globe of earth.Joseph Glanvill.
  3. (transitive) To cause to seem real; to impress upon the mind as actual; to feel vividly or strongly; to make one's own in apprehension or experience.
    • Many coincidences . . . soon begin to appear in them [Greek inscriptions] which realize ancient history to us.Benjamin Jowett.
    • We can not realize it in thought, that the object . . . had really no being at any past moment.Sir William Hamilton.
  4. (transitive) To convert (assets) into actual money.
    • By realizing the company's assets, the liquidator was able to return most of the shareholders' investments.
  5. (transitive) To convert into real property; to make real estate of.
  6. (transitive) To acquire as an actual possession; to obtain as the result of plans and efforts; to gain; to get; as, to realize large profits from a speculation.
    • Knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by diligent thrift realize a good estate.Macaulay.
  7. (transitive) To convert any kind of property into money, especially property representing investments, as shares, bonds, etc.
    • Wary men took the alarm, and began to realize, a word now first brought into use to express the conversion of ideal property into something real.Washington Irving.

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