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summarize

UK/ˈsʌməˌɹaɪz/US/ˈsʌməˌɹaɪz/
verbB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,380 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: summarized, summarizes, summarizing

To summarize is to shrink a long text down to its main points. Summarize the report, to summarize, summarize in a paragraph.

Doing it well requires understanding what the text is for, which is why summarizing is a better test of comprehension than answering questions about it. A summary that keeps every topic and cuts every detail is usually the wrong shape. Note the British spelling summarise.

Definitions of summarize

  1. 1verbsummarizeTo shrink a long text down to its main points.B1+

    “Can you summarize the report in a few sentences for the meeting?”

summarize is a shortening.

Also accepted in games: summarise, sum up

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    summa — total, sum

  2. Medieval Latin

    summārius

  3. Middle English

    summary

  4. English

    summary

  5. English, today

    summarize

From summary + -ize. summary comes from Middle English summary, from Medieval Latin summārius, from Latin summa (“total, sum”) + -ārius.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Academic English

Practise this word

summarize in the wild

  • Since then, various politicians have increasingly employed sound bites to summarize their positions.

    Sound bite

  • A compendium may concisely summarize a larger work.

    Compendium

  • The "world's funniest joke" is a term used by Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in 2002 to summarize one of the results of his research.

    World's funniest joke

  • Solus Christus or In Christo solo is one of the five solae that summarize the Protestant Reformers' basic belief that salvation is by faith in Christ alone.

    Solus Christus

  • Entire handbooks of equations can only summarize most of the full subject, else are highly specialized within a certain field.

    Lists of physics equations

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the summa family

sum

summarize — used about once every 8,568 pages · #11,380 · point at the bar for the others