symbolize

present singular third person symbolizes · participle present symbolizing · participle past symbolized · past symbolized · alternative UK symbolise

1. transitiveTo be symbolic of; to represent.

   Doves often symbolize peace.

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   The broken chain symbolizes freedom.

   The popular late Middle Ages fictional character Robin Hood, dressed in green to symbolize the forest, dodged fines for forest offenses and stole from the rich to give to the poor. But his appeal was painfully real and embodied the struggle over wood.

   2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion

2. intransitivetransitiveTo use symbols; to represent ideas symbolically.
3. transitiveTo convert something into a symbol.

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   The overwhelming majority of these poems consists of wedding-songs, intended for the various ceremonies of the wedding and the daily festivities of the first week after the wedding. But these are not wedding-songs in the ordinary sense. In them, the wedding is symbolized. The poet speaks, indeed, of bride and bridegroom. But thereby he in no sense signifies the young human pair, but rather, true to cabbalistic implication, he intends the bridegroom to be God while the bride is the personified people of Israel.

   1929, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development, page 365

4. intransitiveobsoleteTo resemble each other in qualities or properties; to correspond; to harmonize.

   They both symbolize in this, that they love to look upon themselves through multiplying glasses.

   1640, I. H. [i.e., James Howell], ΔΕΝΔΡΟΛΟΓΊΑ [DENDROLOGIA]. Dodona’s Grove, or, The Vocall Forrest, London: […] T[homas] B[adger] for H. Mosley [i.e., Humphrey Moseley] […], →OCLC

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   The pleasing of colour symbolizeth with the pleasing of any single tone to the ear; but the pleasing of order doth symbolize with harmony.

   1627 (indicated as 1626), Francis [Bacon], “(please specify the page, or |century=I to X)”, in Sylua Syluarum: Or A Naturall Historie. In Ten Centuries. […], London: […] William Rawley […]; [p]rinted by J[ohn] H[aviland] for William Lee […], →OCLC

5. intransitiveobsoleteTo hold the same faith; to agree.

   The believers in pretended miracles have always previously symbolized with the performers of them.

   1824, George Stanley Faber, The Difficulties of Infidelity