Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To make ironic in effect.
- intransitive verb To use irony.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To render ironical; use ironically.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb intransitive To use
irony - verb transitive To treat something in an
ironic fashion
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For a long time, the dominant mode of liberal argument was to ironize, or tut-tut, or dissemble, or manipulate the terms of discourse, or stack the deck in debates that are supposed to be balanced.
Why I'll Miss Keith Olbermann Bret Stephens 2011
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McKenna's solution to romantic-comedy fatigue is not to ironize the genre or make fun of its characters' and therefore its audience's quests for fulfillment, but to give them what they want: a great guy and a great job, a happy family and professional success.
Barbara & Shannon Kelley: Are Working Girl Films A Step Forward Or Backward? Barbara 2011
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In the final analysis, individual sovereignty rests on a leader's ability to ironize the greetings that ostensibly salute his authority.
Article Abstracts 2006
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They don't use a magnifying glass to reproduce, ironize or psychologize about reality.
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The gangster films of the early 1930s use the rebellious figure of the criminal and the hierarchical structure of the criminal organization both to challenge and to ironize capitalism and the business ethic.
Singing Soprano, While Dissin' the Bass: America's White Thug Love & Ethnically Acceptable Violence 2007
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WoW then becomes the thing you ironize and riff off if you are an academic and a game dev...because, well...
Class Begins in... 2005
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To find other artists besides Rohmer who can see this deeply into a character's humanity and make us love him anyway-that is to say, who can ironize with this degree of gentleness-you have to reach up to a pretty high shelf: Shakespeare?
Slate Magazine 2010
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They don't use a magnifying glass to reproduce, ironize or psychologize about reality.
GreenCine Daily 2009
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Of course, we have the right to ironize about the over-the-topness - who among us would so exaggerate the style and so magnify the substance as to make a larger-than-life-size poster, pointing at itself as a deictic genre?
PoetryFoundation.org 2009
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I'm not suggesting that Taylor set out to sandbag or ironize her subjects in "Examined Life."
Salon 2009
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