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colonize

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From colony +‎ -ize.

Pronunciation

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Verb

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colonize (third-person singular simple present colonizes, present participle colonizing, simple past and past participle colonized) (American and Oxford British spelling)

  1. (transitive) To settle (a place) with colonists, and hence make (a place) into a colony.
  2. (transitive) To settle (a group of people, a species, or the like) in a place as a colony.
    • 2011, Steven Z. Kussin, Doctor, Your Patient Will See You Now, page 241:
      When you are colonized by dangerous bacteria their presence in your body does no damage. You become a reservoir for those little stinkers.
  3. (transitive) To settle among and establish control over (the indigenous people of an area).
    • 1988, James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, Oxford, published 2003, page 509:
      The administration finally sent a naval vessel to return the 368 survivors to the United States in 1864. This ended official efforts to colonize blacks.
  4. (intransitive) To begin a colony or colonies.
  5. (transitive, social sciences, by extension) To intrude into and take over (the autonomy, experience, social movement, etc, of a less powerful person or group); to commandeer or appropriate.
    • 2010, Daisy Hernandez, Bushra Rehman, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, →ISBN:
    • 2011, Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies, →ISBN:
      What disservice would be done if issues regarding sexualities in organisations were side-lined by a heteronormative impetus to colonise queer theory?
    • 2015, Kwok Pui-Lan, Laura E. Donaldson, Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, →ISBN:
      For slavery aimed not only to colonize black women's bodies, sex, and sexuality, to undermine her, it sought to subvert and destroy any authentic relationship between black women and black men as well as among black women themselves.
    • 2016, Nick Rumens, Queer Company: The Role and Meaning of Friendship in Gay Men's Work, →ISBN:
      […] suggesting that organisational discourses of heteronormativity cannot fully colonise gay sexualities and genders.
    • 2017, Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, →ISBN:
      The burden of judgment imposed by the politics of respectability can easily colonize black minds.
    • 2017 June 13, One Year After Pulse, Don't You Dare Come for Any of Us (Lambda Legal):
      "To have our grief colonized to facilitate a racist political agenda was beyond offensive."
    • 2021 August 23, Libby Brooks, quoting Kathleen Jamie, “Scotland’s new makar Kathleen Jamie: ‘Poetry is at the heart of our culture’”, in The Guardian‎[1], →ISSN:
      These award-winning works of nature writing have extended and enhanced a genre that Jamie herself has criticised, describing it as “colonised by middle-class white men”.

Derived terms

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Translations

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Galician

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Verb

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colonize

  1. (reintegrationist norm) inflection of colonizar:
    1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
    2. third-person singular imperative

Portuguese

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Verb

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colonize

  1. inflection of colonizar:
    1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
    2. third-person singular imperative
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