Manhattanize

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To construct many tall or densely situated buildings in (a city). transitive

    "San Francisco's Board of Supervisors last month approved a new zoning law designed to limit the height and size of office towers and to reduce by half the projected employment growth downtown over the next 15 years. ¶ Adoption of the plan came after more than a decade of complaints from San Franciscans that their city was being "Manhattanized.""

Example

More examples

"San Francisco's Board of Supervisors last month approved a new zoning law designed to limit the height and size of office towers and to reduce by half the projected employment growth downtown over the next 15 years. ¶ Adoption of the plan came after more than a decade of complaints from San Franciscans that their city was being "Manhattanized.""

Etymology

From Manhattan + -ize.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.