facialize

F4A1C3I1A1L1I1Z10E1

verb

To put a face to; to give a face.

First used 20th centuryScrabble 23

Meanings

verbfacialize (third-person singular simple present facializes, present participle facializing, simple past and past participle facialized)

present singular third person facializes · participle present facializing · participle past facialized · past facialized

  1. rareTo put a face to; to give a face.First known use 20th century

    Palestinians, Arabs were facialized, given the face of Saddam Hussein, […]

    1992, Orientalism and cultural differences, page 30
    3 more examples

    Likewise, this trend in the public sphere to put "faces" on social problems has the paradoxical effect of making the faces generic and not individual: thus the facializing gesture that promotes identification across the spaces of alterity is, in effect, an equivocal challenge to shift the political and cultural boundaries of what will count politically as human.

    1996, Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, →ISBN, page 435

    […] a Shell official handed a representative from each organization a gigantic symbolic check amid the flash of cameras, and they appeared as grateful recipients of Shell's outsized generosity. This image was reproduced in the publicity sent to people who were removed from the political grounds in Dock Sud and helped facialize the company in benevolent terms to people far away from Argentina, […]

    2012, Elana Shever, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina, →ISBN, page 176

    Collaging a woman's face on top of the original page offers Mutu the possibility to facialize the medical text.

    2013, Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value, →ISBN
  2. rareTo see as or cause to be seen as facial, or as having face-like features. (Compare e.g. anthropomorphize.)First known use 20th century

    Second, it enables us to see landscape as facial, that is, to naturalize the face or facialize nature.

    2013, Seung-hoon Jeong, Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media, →ISBN, page 168
    1 more example

    The process of facializing the forest, of structuring it around the rhetorical figure of prosopopoesis — from the Greek prosopon, "face," and poiein, "to make" — […]

    2008, Stuart Kane, “The Green Man and the Facial Machine”, in Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, page 43
  3. rareTo give a facial (sex act) to.First known use 21st century

    Sweet teen analized hard doggystyle and facialized

    2006 September 27, cha...@hushmail.com, “Hardcore indian sex, Brittney skye facial cum, Monica sweetheart enjoys slurping”, in alt.sex.nfs (Usenet)
    1 more example

    Yeah, you blew it with America 's sweetheart, but guys like us really only want to deflower, defile, sodomize, and facialize a good-girl sweetheart anyway.

    2011, Steve Coney, Gardening With Napalm, →ISBN, page 102
  4. rareTo give a facial (personal beauty treatment) to.

    […] a manicure and, if time permits, a pedicure. I'm lying on the elevated table in one of the private rooms waiting for Helga, the skin technician, to facialize me.

    1991, Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, London: Picador, →ISBN, page 114

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

facialize. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/facialize

MLA

“facialize.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/facialize. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “facialize,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/facialize.

Source: facialize on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.