operationalize

present singular third person operationalizes · participle present operationalizing · participle past operationalized · past operationalized · alternative operationalise

1. transitiveTo make operational.

   I have a lot of sexual fantasies that I'm never going to operationalize. I enjoy them just as fantasies.

   1981 August 15, Nancy Wechsler, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, “Sadomasochism: Fears, Facts, Fantasies”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 5, page 6

2. transitivehuman sciencesTo define (a concept) in such a way that it can be practically measured.

   Vision seems ‘childishly simple’ to us but proves to be fiendishly hard to operationalise, precisely because we are so good at it.

   2012, Adam Zeman, ‘Only Connect’, Literary Review, number 399

   2 more examples

   To operationalize a concept is to identify those variables in terms of which the phenomenon represented by the concept can be accurately observed.

   1956, Ernest Greenwood, “New Directions in Delinquency Research: A Commentary on a Study by Bernard Lander”, in Social Service Review, volume 30, number 2, page 152

   General vocabulary is often defined as a common core of English words and operationalized as the most frequent words in a balanced and representative corpus of English.

   2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 107