MEANING
1. To show that an apparently natural arrangement was shaped by social or historical choices.
2. To take away citizenship previously granted to someone born in another country.
3. To change something so that it loses its natural character or qualities.
Use it for
questioning whether a social arrangement is inevitable; showing that a supposedly natural category was socially created; challenging assumptions treated as timeless facts; making familiar institutions available for criticismSeparates showing that a social arrangement is historically made from merely describing it as unusual or artificial. Writing functions: Analysis / Interpretation, Theory / Conceptual Language.
Words that belong together
- denaturalize social categories
- denaturalize gender roles
- denaturalize an assumption
On the page
The historian denaturalizes the household by tracing how law shaped its boundaries.
Comparing inheritance systems can denaturalize assumptions about who should own land.
The court considered whether the state could denaturalize a citizen for fraud in the application.
Being denaturalized and being deported are distinct legal events.
The critic argues that the rigid staging denaturalizes the actors’ speech.
Word forms
- Base
- denaturalize
- Past tense
- denaturalized
- Past participle
- denaturalized
- Present participle
- denaturalizing
Full tense & aspect guide
- Present
- denaturalize
- Present continuous
- am/is/are denaturalizing
- Present perfect
- have/has denaturalized
- Present perfect continuous
- have/has been denaturalizing
- Past
- denaturalized
- Past continuous
- was/were denaturalizing
- Past perfect
- had denaturalized
- Past perfect continuous
- had been denaturalizing
- Future
- will denaturalize
- Future continuous
- will be denaturalizing
- Future perfect
- will have denaturalized
- Future perfect continuous
- will have been denaturalizing
Choose the auxiliary that agrees with your subject. These are constructions of one word, not separate entries.
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Usage notes
Transitive verb: denaturalize; denaturalizes; denaturalized; denaturalized; denaturalizing. Future: will denaturalize. UK variant: denaturalise, not a separate entry. Register: academic. Commonness: uncommon (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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