petrolize

English

Etymology

From petrol +‎ -ize.

Verb

petrolize (third-person singular simple present petrolizes, present participle petrolizing, simple past and past participle petrolized)

1. (transitive) To treat (water) with kerosene in order to exterminate mosquitoes.
   • 2003, Diego Armus, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS:

     Over a four-year period the RF led a large-scale assault on yellow fever's Aedes aegypti mosquito vector, organizing a small army of Mexican and American doctors and local assistants and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to spray, petrolize, drain, fill, and deposit larvicidal fishes in virtually every home, breeding site, and stagnant water source in the region of Veracruz.

2. To convert into a petroleum-based economy.
   • 2012, Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, page 182:

     Once oil accounts for 30 percent of a nation's exports, the money petrolizes the place, the same way human slavery changed Rome, Brazil, and the U.S. South.

   • 2014, Douglas C. Bennett, Transnational Corporations versus the State:

     Despite the efforts taken to forestall them, Mexico found itself with all the symptoms of a “petrolized” economy.

   • 2017, Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, editor, The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871, page 302:

     The Mexican economy did not 'petrolize', as happened in Venezuela, since oil production represented only between 10 per cent and 14 per cent of GDP in this period.

Related terms

• petrolization