normalize

present singular third person normalizes · participle present normalizing · participle past normalized · past normalized · alternative UK normalise

1. transitiveTo make normal, to bring into alignment with an established standard.

   There is little hope that the two countries will normalize relations; their governments seem to hate each other and would just as soon stay on bad terms.

   2 more examples

   Advocacy groups have long known the power of TV plot lines. Back in the 1980s, the Harvard School of Public Health mounted a campaign to normalize the idea of a “designated driver” to reduce drunk driving.

   2014 March 27, Robin Marantz Henig, “Fictional Plotlines and Real Assisted Suicide”, in The Atlantic

   Whether or not the Trump administration moves ahead, officials and observers say the proposal has normalized the forcible transfer of Palestinians – classified as “ethnic cleansing” and a “war crime” by the United Nations.

   2025 February 6, Taylor Luck, Ghada Abdulfattah, “How Trump’s proposed plan for Gaza has united an outraged Arab world”, in The Christian Science Monitor

2. transitiveTo consider normal, to treat as standard in the face of older norms.
3. transitiveTo format in a standardized manner, to make consistent.

   We'll need to normalize these statements before we can compare them.

4. intransitiveTo become normal; to return to a normal state.
5. transitivemathematicsTo reduce the variations by excluding irrelevant aspects.

   After we properly normalize the measurements with respect to age, gender, geography and economic considerations, there remains little evidence of a difference between the two groups.

   2 more examples

   The Dice coefficient normalizes for length by dividing by the total number of non-zero entries. We multiply by 2 so that we get a measure that ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 with 1.0 indicating identical vectors.

   1991, Christopher D. Manning, Hinrich Schütze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 299

   It is possible that electrical stimulation may also act centrally, neuromodulating the altered muscle contractibility mechanism, recruiting a larger number of muscle fibers and normalizing the tone of the masticatory, hyoid and pharyngeal muscles [38 ,39 ].

   2015 August 7, “Effects of Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation on the Masticatory Muscles and Physiologic Sleep Variables in Adults with Cerebral Palsy: A Novel Therapeutic Approach”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI

6. transitiverail transportTo return a set of points (switches) to the normal position.

   Antonyms: reverse

7. intransitiverail transportTo return to the normal position from the reverse position.

   Antonyms: reverse

8. transitivecomputingTo subject to normalization; to eliminate redundancy in (a model for storing data).
9. transitiveengineeringTo anneal (steel) for the purpose of decreasing brittleness and increasing ductility.

   1 more example

   Charpy impact testing showed that the normalized steel in the tank shell of the punctured chlorine car had a fracture toughness that was significantly greater than the fracture toughness of the non-normalized steels of the catastrophically ruptured tank cars involved in the derailment of a Canadian Pacific Railway freight train in Minot, North Dakota, in January 2002. The steel in the Minot tank cars exhibited relatively low fracture toughness, and cracks propagated rapidly around the circumference of each tank. The higher fracture toughness in the Graniteville tank car contributed to the relatively quick arrest of the crack even though there was brittle fracture in its outer portions.

   2005 November 29, National Transportation Safety Board, “Tank Car Crashworthiness”, in Collision of Norfolk Southern Freight Train 192 With Standing Norfolk Southern Local Train P22 With Subsequent Hazardous Materials Release at Graniteville, South Carolina, January 6, 2005, archived from the original on 17 Jun 2022, page 50

10. transitivemathematicsTo divide a vector by its magnitude to produce a unit vector.
11. transitivemathematicsTo constrain a number's absolute value to be 1 at maximum. More generally, to constrain the magnitude of a mathematical quantity to be 1 at maximum.