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Definition of "characterize" []

  • To describe the qualities or peculiarities of: characterized the warden as ruthless. (verb-transitive)
  • To be a distinctive trait or mark of; distinguish: the rash and high fever that characterize this disease; a region that is characterized by its dikes and canals. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "characterize" in a sentence
  • "Clarity, pertinence, and reasonableness again characterize Weil's writing, and a hefty clutch of recipes concludes."
  • "The use of it in the way you characterize is exactly as you note, and actually injects the writer’s POV into the piece."
  • "Nineteenth-and early twentieth-century writers used the term to characterize abnormalities of language production (e.g., paraphasic speech, speech without content, neologisms), rather than to define aberrant concept formation and abstraction (e.g., unable to recognize the basic category of such objects as apples and pears), which also are observed in schizophrenics."