Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To make popular.
  • transitive verb To present in a widely understandable or acceptable form.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To make popular; treat in a popular manner, or so as to be generally intelligible to common people; spread among the people. Also spelled popularise.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To make popular; to make suitable or acceptable to the common people; to make generally known.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb American Alternative spelling of popularise.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb make understandable to the general public
  • verb cater to popular taste to make popular and present to the general public; bring into general or common use

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

popular +‎ -ize

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Examples

  • So maybe a better way to "popularize" poetry -- hell, maybe a better way just to explain it -- would be to further valorize the dead, though with the caveat that the dead include the living.

    Travis Nichols: Let Us Now Praise Undead Poets 2010

  • So maybe a better way to "popularize" poetry -- hell, maybe a better way just to explain it -- would be to further valorize the dead, though with the caveat that the dead include the living.

    Travis Nichols: Let Us Now Praise Undead Poets 2010

  • We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's sic! that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture…

    Archive 2006-03-01 Christopher O'Brien 2006

  • We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's sic! that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture…

    More on Farah's Lunacy Christopher O'Brien 2006

  • We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's sic! that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture…

    From the Archives: Hitler Was A Christian and Himmler Didn't Like Evolution Christopher O'Brien 2006

  • We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's sic! that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture…

    Archive 2006-08-01 Christopher O'Brien 2006

  • Freytag did not attempt to "popularize" them by cheap methods.

    The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 Various

  • The attempt to "popularize" recruiting was soon found to entail serious evils.

    Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights Kelly Miller 1901

  • We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture.

    Documenting Reality Pigeon 2010

  • Guy Lombardo, one of the white bandleaders who helped popularize jazz on Fifty-second Street, recalled that for many years “nightclub owners simply refused to break the color line, fearing financial consequences.”

    A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

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