Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To make into a thing; make real or material; consider as a thing.
Wiktionary
WordNet 3.0
- v. consider an abstract concept to be real
Etymologies
- Back-formation from reification, calque from German. Formed as Latin rēs ("thing") + -ify (English suffix). (Wiktionary)
- Latin rēs, rē-, thing; see rē- in Indo-European roots + -fy. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I implemented my lazymap library in terms reify where gen-class was required before.”
“Factor analysis is harmless as data reduction, but it is tempting to "reify" the factors, to suppose that they are the hidden causes behind the observations.”
“The usual inclination, however, is to reify, sometimes magnify, differences, especially when we consider culture and violence.”
“It is easy to reify the categories—German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Turk and Armenian, Catholic Irish and Protestant Irish—but difficult to flesh them out.”
“No, Obama has thrown down the gauntlet, and is trying to reify the sloganeering of the 1960s.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » What’s next for the Obama Administration?
“I have been witness to efforts by some in the Middle East to twist and distort comments made by American policymakers, Israeli leaders, and others in order to reify their fantastic but unreal constructs explaining some international event or accident or decision.”
The Huffington Post: Steve Clemons: Conspiracism American Style: The Daniel Levy Debate
“A law student might even claim that it does more than reify our sins, but that it alsodispenses justice, if it were not for the fact that not only the greedy now suffer.”
“Markus might as well have been describing the existential state of a burgeoning class of male poets who use masculine-coded grammar, syntax, diction, rhythm, and rhetoric to reify the terminally-compromised state of masculinity in the present era.”
The Huffington Post: Seth Abramson: December 2011 Contemporary Poetry Reviews
“This is done in order to reify that binary and make it appear to be "natural," rather than arbitrary.”
“When Helen posted the headline ‘Cis man murders woman’ recently it * was* surprising, because it de-familiarised the usual power imbalances that journalists just unthinkingly reify.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘reify’.
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Cepstrums
to cepstrumize a word is to reverse its 1st 4 characters in the way that "cepstrum" was derived from "spectrum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepstrum...
acedy, adustion, sudation, aedility, ideality, agentive, negative, agral, argal, agrestic, ergastic, alerce and 202 more...
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words 1
Traduce, Ramify, precipitous, rapture, adumbrate, knell, smolder, vagary, choleric, sibylline, hypocritical, jejune and 135 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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gre words
convoluted, deride, melancholy, antagonize, antagonize, deference, portentous, prodigious, ruminate, ineffable, turgid, mossy and 58 more...
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I keep forgetting
Words I keep looking up and still keep forgetting the definition of
reify, phthisic, taghairm, makar, sciamachy, chevelure, smaragdine, vicinal, rixatrix, polynya, hamadryad, cloud-built and 5 more...
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Literary critical terms
cathexis, catachresis, polyvocal, alterity, liminality, liminal, limn, erasure, metonymic, intertextual, intrapoetic, contradistinction and 66 more...
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gre2
aberrant, aberration, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate and 1824 more...
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work these into conversation
Challenge!
legerdemain, polysemic, rupestrian, callipygian, oscitancy, numen, lucubration, asperity, amalgam, apposite, wastrel, eleemosynary and 208 more...
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Dan: You read this already. — Your p...
Long ago, I learned a useful habit from a good friend: Every time he looked up a word in his dictionary, he’d put a mark next to it. His explanation for this was vague at best, but I understood a...
dittography, haplology, haplography, idiomology, cacoepy, orthoepist, psellism, pronunciation spe..., galbe, theropod, publican, sciolist and 111 more...
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known words
words wot i already knew
antisyzygy, calenture, shill, saudade, sehnsucht, squonk, steganographic, anomie, wiggy, grok, hermeneutics, agrise and 206 more...
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thekatespanos's list
pomposity, gaggle, scintilla, lemming, bilk, vanquish, conflate, plenary, verisimilitude, perspicacious, rattletrap, obdurate and 325 more...
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Epicurean
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bintalshamsa's list
My Favorite Words
weltschmerz, perspicacity, idée fixe, invigilator, salubrious, tchotchke, ex nihilo, invidious, malapropism, naïve, sardonic, elide and 1401 more...
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newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
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Stumbled Words
A list of words that I stumbled upon while reading.
penumbra, prolix, propitious, resplendence, sepulchral, Weltschmerz, apparition, brigand, probity, chalice, paroxysm, pallor and 160 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for reify.
vermontster Using or misusing this word is a in-group password in our social sciences grad program. The concept seems important - I still 'intensely dislike' the word. Jun 28, 2008
burntsox A law professor used this in a lecture today. I didn't know what it meant then, but I'm now fairly sure she wasn't using it correctly. Mar 26, 2008
stephanieconn wha? oh MAN..... Mar 12, 2008