operationalize

• operationalise

From operational +‎ -ize.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ɒpəˈɹeɪʃ(ə)nəlʌɪz/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˌɑpəˈɹeɪʃənəˌlaɪz/

operationalize (third-person singular simple present operationalizes, present participle operationalizing, simple past and past participle operationalized)

1. (transitive) To make operational.
   • 1981 August 15, Nancy Wechsler, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, “Sadomasochism: Fears, Facts, Fantasies”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 5, page 6:

     I have a lot of sexual fantasies that I'm never going to operationalize. I enjoy them just as fantasies.

2. (transitive, social sciences) To define (a concept) in such a way that it can be practically measured.
   • 1956, Ernest Greenwood, “New Directions in Delinquency Research: A Commentary on a Study by Bernard Lander”, in Social Service Review, volume 30, number 2, page 152:

     To operationalize a concept is to identify those variables in terms of which the phenomenon represented by the concept can be accurately observed.

   • 2012, Adam Zeman, ‘Only Connect’, Literary Review, number 399:

     Vision seems ‘childishly simple’ to us but proves to be fiendishly hard to operationalise, precisely because we are so good at it.

   • 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 107:

     General vocabulary is often defined as a common core of English words and operationalized as the most frequent words in a balanced and representative corpus of English.