MEANING
1. To make someone more aware of an issue and more responsive to its importance or effects.
2. To make an organism, tissue, or other biological system respond more strongly to a stimulus.
3. To treat a material so that it reacts to light, especially for making photographic images.
Use it for
describing attention being drawn to a previously overlooked problem; distinguishing increased awareness from factual instruction alone; explaining how experience changes what a reader noticesDistinguishes heightened awareness from increased physiological responsiveness and the separate photographic process. Writing functions: Causation / Relationships, Analysis / Interpretation.
Words that belong together
- sensitize readers to an issue
- sensitize researchers to context
- sensitize staff to participants’ needs
On the page
The preliminary interviews sensitized researchers to distinctions that the original questionnaire had missed.
The novel sensitizes readers to humiliations that its narrator initially treats as ordinary.
An earlier exposure may sensitize the immune system without producing an immediately visible reaction.
The discussion distinguishes conditions that sensitize tissue from those that damage it directly.
The catalogue explains how artists sensitized paper before exposing it to light.
Word forms
- Base
- sensitize
- Past tense
- sensitized
- Past participle
- sensitized
- Present participle
- sensitizing
Full tense & aspect guide
- Present
- sensitize
- Present continuous
- am/is/are sensitizing
- Present perfect
- have/has sensitized
- Present perfect continuous
- have/has been sensitizing
- Past
- sensitized
- Past continuous
- was/were sensitizing
- Past perfect
- had sensitized
- Past perfect continuous
- had been sensitizing
- Future
- will sensitize
- Future continuous
- will be sensitizing
- Future perfect
- will have sensitized
- Future perfect continuous
- will have been sensitizing
Choose the auxiliary that agrees with your subject. These are constructions of one word, not separate entries.
Usage notes
Transitive, sometimes intransitive: sensitizes, sensitized, sensitized, sensitizing; future will sensitize. Sensitize someone to an issue or organism to a stimulus. UK sensitise is an alias. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
Keep a thought for later. Sign in to save privately.