Meaning & use

normalize

verb·Academic

To make something considered unusual or unacceptable seem ordinary and widely accepted.

See it in a sentence

Critics worried the comedy would normalize rude behavior among young viewers.

The company hopes to normalize remote work as a standard option for employees.

A note on using this word

In statistics and computing, normalize has a separate technical sense: to adjust data to a common scale.

Words with a similar meaning

standardizelegitimize

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

Words with an opposite meaning

stigmatize

Another way to use it

2. verb

To adjust values measured on different scales to a common standard scale.

The researchers normalized the test scores before comparing results across schools.

Make it your own

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