visualize

Verb

1. To perceive (something) visually; to see.
   • Be sure to find an area far away from the city or street lights, the darker the better. Lean back or lie flat on your back with your feet facing south and visualize as much of the sky as possible. Most meteors appear as...
2. To depict (something) in a way which can be seen.
   • to visualize data using a chart
   • When [Vincent] van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment in time. His painting does not represent the...
   • The black male model in the hoodie references the trope of the urban black menace so clearly visualized in the ghetto action films of the early 1990s as well as in contemporary music videos. - 2005, Nicole R. Fleetwood,...
3. To form a mental picture of (something); to picture (something) in the mind; to envisage.
   • In our own poetry we get from [Geoffrey] Chaucer the first instance of self-analysis and description, the first case of visualising self. - 1899, F. F. Leighton, “‘In My Mind’s Eye, Horatio’”, in Life and Books, London:...
   • The humanitarian, frequently ignoring hard reality, visualises one cosmopolitan community where justice and social sympathy measured in terms of some one set of units reign supreme. - 1921 October, Lynden Macassey,...
   • And though I can still see the shape of her that day huddled on the steps, her back view when we were in the car, her brown tweed suit and squashy felt hat, I can't visualize her face at all. When I try to, I just see...

   Coordinate Terms: audialize auralize kinesthetize olfactorize tactilize tactualize

4. To make (a hidden or unclear body part, process, or object) visible by optical methods (such as endoscopy, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, or X-rays), or other techniques.
   • An investigation is described in which the phenomena of afterglow were utilized to make visible the low-density supersonic flows of various gases. […] The afterglow is shown to be effective in visualizing some of the...
   • When small masses are to be detected, it is necessary to visualise as much of the lung as possible with as little structured noise as possible. This is accomplished with high-voltage, wide-latitude, image recording and...

   Antonyms: hide

   Hyponyms: image

5. To perceive something visually.
   • His first impression was that he had tackled a dozen Oochaks instead of one. Beyond that first impression his mind did not work, nor did his eyes visualize. - 1919, James Oliver Curwood, chapter 10, in Nomads of the...
6. To form a mental picture of something; to picture something in the mind.