Petrolize
verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To treat (water) with kerosene in order to exterminate mosquitoes. transitive
"Over a four-year period the RF led a large-scale assault on yellow fever's Aedes aegypti mosquito vector, organizing a small army of Mexican and American doctors and local assistants and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to spray, petrolize, drain, fill, and deposit larvicidal fishes in virtually every home, breeding site, and stagnant water source in the region of Veracruz."
- 2 To convert into a petroleum-based economy.
"Once oil accounts for 30 percent of a nation's exports, the money petrolizes the place, the same way human slavery changed Rome, Brazil, and the U.S. South."
Example
More examples"Over a four-year period the RF led a large-scale assault on yellow fever's Aedes aegypti mosquito vector, organizing a small army of Mexican and American doctors and local assistants and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to spray, petrolize, drain, fill, and deposit larvicidal fishes in virtually every home, breeding site, and stagnant water source in the region of Veracruz."
Etymology
From petrol + -ize.
More for "petrolize"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.