womanize

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

woman + -ize

Verb

womanize (third-person singular simple present womanizes, present participle womanizing, simple past and past participle womanized)

  1. (intransitive, said of a man) To flirt with and/or seduce, or attempt to seduce, women, especially lecherously.
  2. (transitive, usually figuratively) To turn into a woman; to feminize.
    • a. 1590, Phillip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia:
      And herein do these kinds of loves imitate the excellent; for as the love of heaven makes one heavenly, the love of virtue virtuous, so doth the love of the world make one become worldly; and this effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man that, if he yield to it, will not only make him an Amazon, but a launder, a distaff, a spinner, or whatsoever other vile occupation their idle heads can imagine and their weak hands perform.
    • 2000, Randy Lee Eickhoff, The sorrows, page 84:
      Another bolt passed between Iucharba's legs, nearly womanizing him with its blast of heat. "EEEeeeYOW!" he howled.
    • 2000, Claudia V. Camp, Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible, page 104:
      Samson himself is a gender paradox: while the focus on his hair links him with the women he pursues, it is also the source of his masculine strength, whose loss womanizes him.
    • 2008, Wendy Olmsted, The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton and their Contexts:
      Love for a woman was believed to produce an especially dangerous kind of effeminacy. Following this line of thinking, Musidorus charges that Pyrocles' infatuation threatens to 'womanize' him

Derived terms

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