Skip to main content
to thematize

to thematize

8.2
To organize ideas or information by their main topics
  • verb
  • /ˈθiːməˌtaɪz/
  • Formal
translation icon : tematizar
  • The director chose to thematize the struggle between tradition and modernity in his latest film.
  • novel thematizes
  • thematizes the issue

So, you know, what is Miller doing by by thematizing religion.

Examples

  • No single incident focuses the viewer's attention; it is a composition that thematizes movement.

    Academic text (2005)
  • I am not claiming that Ruscha intended his sixteen books to thematize these various aspects of photography.

    Academic text (2005)
  • To depict walking was to thematize motion.

    Academic text (2005)
  • He's not going to thematize it quite so much as later thinkers will.

  • Patinir is by no means the first artist to thematize that fallible human choice based on the sense of sight.

    Academic text (2001)
  • And thus the story also thematizes the expression and sublimation of the very process of desire.

    Academic text (2001)
  • Much local literature thematizes the hegemony of the nation-state.

    Academic text (1995)
  • As shown here, these terms allow Olmedo to thematize a variety of concerns: marriage, life, death and remembrance, and epochal shifts in history.

    Academic text (2001)
  • Collis thematizes public space as a kind of "volume" in which poetry's radical impulses materialize.

    Academic text (2013)
  • "El Aleph" thematizes and parodies various attempts to encompass the totality of experience in a single representative form.

    Academic text (2001)

Synonyms

to theme
vsto thematize
1 6.1

To give something a particular subject or style

focuses on arranging material by identifying and emphasizing recurring subjects

Antonyms

4 4.5

To make something lose its order or structure

How Thematic

to center on
  • US
47 3.2
to thematize
  • Formal
8.2
to address
3.6
to refer
818 2.4

Surface Forms

thematize infinitive
thematized past
thematized past participle
thematizing present participle
thematizes third person singular

Morphology

thematize = theme (transparent) = theme + ize

The verb is a regular verb-forming derivation meaning 'make into a theme' and is directly interpretable from 'theme' + '-ize'.

Etymology

The word thematize comes from the Greek root thema, meaning 'theme' or 'subject', and it is the same root as the English word theme. So to thematize something is to make it into a theme or to organise ideas and materials by topics.