How to Use civilize in a Sentence

civilize

verb
  • They believed it was their duty to civilize the native people.
  • Her parents hoped that boarding school might civilize her some.
  • He is credited with civilizing the treatment of people with mental illnesses.
  • Trump still hasn’t learned to shut up and try to be civilized.
    — Los Angeles Times, 23 Mar. 2026
  • Trump still hasn’t learned to shut up and try to be civilized.
    — George Skelton, Mercury News, 26 Mar. 2026
  • Schools are usually the last chance to civilize children if their family has failed to do so.
    — WSJ, 21 Dec. 2018
  • Down a flight of stairs, away from the cars, the riverwalk was designed as a refuge from the hubbub, a civilizing force in the urban push and jangle.
    — Mary Schmich, chicagotribune.com, 17 May 2018
  • In its little, domestic world, writing civilized the middle-class home. Williams avoids Jane Austen, on the reasonable ground that a lot has already been done on her.
    — John Sutherland, New York Times, 2 Jan. 2018
  • Such road diets aren’t novel as an effort to civilize urban thoroughfares.
    — Kevin Spear, OrlandoSentinel.com, 27 Feb. 2018
  • As a human being at this moment, Eunice teaches us about being civilized.
    — Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY, 14 Feb. 2025
  • These facts, in turn, were wielded as evidence for the need of a civilizing Christian influence.
    — David Wingrave, Harpers Magazine, 24 Oct. 2025
  • These facts, in turn, were wielded as evidence for the need of a civilizing Christian influence.
    — Harpers Magazine, 23 Sep. 2025
  • The mission to civilize some in the NFL has obviously fallen on deaf ears.
    — Herbie Teope, NOLA.com, 8 Mar. 2018
  • If Providence gave Americans the right to civilize a continent, why not the world?
    — Literary Hub, 15 Oct. 2025
  • At the heart of both lie an unwillingness to confront the sins of the nation, by two countries that prefer to see themselves as moral arbiters and civilizing forces.
    — Rachel Withers, Slate Magazine, 24 Aug. 2017
  • Crusoe keeps Friday as a servant, implying that the best way to civilize a savage is to subordinate him.
    — Pallavi Kottamasu, BostonGlobe.com, 2 June 2018
  • The island would magically civilize us into our best possible versions of ourselves.
    — Brie Dyas, House Beautiful, 18 Nov. 2016
  • In their efforts to civilize the workplace, however, Roosevelt and his allies didn’t set up a new institution for workers to speak through.
    — Caleb Crain, The New Yorker, 19 Aug. 2019
  • Gardens civilize our relationship with nature, but only barely so; there’s always the serpent of surprise lurking somewhere in the shrubbery.
    — Christoph Irmscher, WSJ, 20 Dec. 2021
  • The city and the waterfront corporation need to take a more active role in civilizing Delaware Avenue.
    — Inga Saffron, Philly.com, 28 June 2018
  • The violence that the banana goliath’s civilizing mission unleashes upon the Colombian landscape and its people is not a bug.
    — Eduardo Porter, Washington Post, 1 July 2024
  • During the 1870s, Fred Harvey did more to civilize the Wild West than anyone with a six-shooter.
    — Roger Naylor, The Arizona Republic, 10 Sep. 2020
  • Harsh as the surrounding environment is, the building single-handedly civilizes this corner.
    — Inga Saffron, Philly.com, 4 Apr. 2018
  • By 1912, the vast majority of states had adopted practices intended to civilize voting.
    — Kate Keller, Smithsonian, 15 June 2018
  • The transition from raw wood to finished object also speaks to traditional ideas of civilizing — something education is supposed to do — and to humans’ vast debt to nature.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 14 July 2023
  • For Portugal, education was an important part of its civilizing mission.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Apr. 2026
  • Colonialism, once equated by the West with civilizing progress, became synonymous with iniquity.
    — Roger Cohen, New York Times, 10 Dec. 2023
  • This project - relatively small in comparison to that of building the two new bridges - deserves to be celebrated locally and to serve as a national example of how to civilize the interstates in cities.
    — Steven Litt, cleveland.com, 13 Aug. 2017
  • The United Kingdom’s nineteenth-century civilizing mission, although rarely mentioned in Stern’s work, was an article of faith at home and in the empire.
    — Caroline Elkins, Foreign Affairs, 22 Aug. 2023
  • Parking is torturous enough through the Melrose corridor on the weekdays, plus giving a restaurant staff off on Saturday and Sunday seems boldly civilized.
    — Bill Addison, Los Angeles Times, 19 Sep. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'civilize.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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