Metabolize
verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To undergo metabolism. intransitive
- 2 produce by metabolism wordnet
- 3 To cause a substance to undergo metabolism. transitive
"Among the many types of juice, grapefruit stands out from the pack because it changes the way some people absorb and metabolize different drugs."
- 4 To produce a substance using metabolism. transitive
- 5 To absorb and process as if by metabolism. broadly, transitive
"We believe this to be the true way to teach zoölogy, for we doubt the value to a man of a mass of indefinite ill-digested text-book information. Occasionally an omnivore can take in every thin, and digest and so metabolize it as to organize it into healthy mental tissue. They are, however, the few."
Example
More examples"If you are an older patient and if you don’t have the liver and kidney function you had when you were younger you may not metabolize drugs the same way."
Etymology
From Ancient Greek μετᾰβολή (metăbolḗ, “change, mutation”) + -ize.
More for "metabolize"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.