theorize

• theorise (British)

From theory +‎ -ize. First use appears c. 1599 in the text A pil to purge melancholie.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈθɪə.ɹaɪz/, /ˈθiː.ə.ɹaɪz/, /ˈθɪɹ.aɪz/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈθɪɹ.aɪz/, /ˈθi.ə.ɹaɪz/
• (General Australian) IPA^(key): /ˈθɪə.ɹɑɪz/, /ˈθiː.ə.ɹɑɪz/, /ˈθɪɹ.ɑɪz/

theorize (third-person singular simple present theorizes, present participle theorizing, simple past and past participle theorized)

1. (intransitive) To formulate a theory, especially about some specific subject.
   • 2002, Dave Hill, Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, page 257:

     Derridean "messianicity without messianism" that marks so much of post-modernist educational theorizing today, and that makes use of esotericism, sigetics, acroamatics, proleptics, and illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in the disguise of a new pedagogy of the unknowable, wasn't the answer ten years ago.

   • 2018, Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society: The Future of Work, page 152:

     There are processes of collective individuation that produce the transindividual in the course of a process of transindividuation (which Simondon does not theorize as such).

   • 2021, Ryan Lee Cartwright, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 188:

     Autistic rhetoric scholar Melanie Yergeau theorizes neuroqueer as a kind of “asocially perverse” motioning.

   • 2022 June 22, Selim Algar, “Incensed owner of $8M Florida mansion ransacked by teens wants them prosecuted”, in New York Post‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: News Corp, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 3 July 2022:

     The homeowner theorized that the intruders saw that the house was up for sale and targeted it for their rager.

2. (intransitive) To speculate.

• otherize