reification
/ˌɹeɪəfəˈkeɪʃən/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.87 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
A process that makes a computable/addressable object out of a non-computable/addressable one; or a concrete class out of a generic one.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
The transformation of a natural-language statement into a form in which its actions and events are quantifiable variables.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "The reification of art and religion, a symptom of their historical obsolescence, takes the form of their instrumentalization, their reduction to a mere use value. At this point they become ‘cultural goods’, writes Adorno, and ‘are no longer taken quite seriously by anybody.’"
- "Computer scientists found out how functional reification is in programming languages: they call it ‘object-oriented programming’ […]."
- "Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.”"
- "Contrary to Java, C++ and C# implement generics via reification, meaning that each specific version of a generic class, like List is converted into a concrete class, either at compile time (C++) or at runtime (C#)."
Etymology
Origin
- Source language: Latin
Word Breakdown
- Root: rēs