institutionalize
- Verb:
- To place or confine (a person) in an institution, especially for care, treatment, or custody: This is the most common meaning, referring to the formal process of admitting someone to a facility like a hospital, prison, or care home.
- To establish as a norm or custom within an organization or society: This meaning refers to making a practice, procedure, or pattern an accepted and permanent part of a system.
Verb (Placing in an institution): The court decided to institutionalize the patient for her own safety and treatment.In the past, families sometimes felt pressured to institutionalize elderly relatives.
Verb (Establishing as a norm): The company sought to institutionalize best practices across all its departments.Over time, the annual charity drive became institutionalized within the community.
Passive Voice: Often used in the passive form to describe the state of being in an institution or the state of being an established norm. Patients who were institutionalized for long periods often faced challenges reintegrating into society.Corruption had become so institutionalized that it was considered a normal part of doing business.
"To become institutionalized": Can describe a person who has adapted so completely to life in an institution that they cannot function outside of it. After forty years in prison, he had become institutionalized and feared his release.
Institutionalization (noun): The process or end result of institutionalizing. The institutionalization of the new policy took several years.
Institutional (adjective): Relating to or characteristic of an institution. They faced institutional barriers to change.
Institutionalise (verb): British English spelling variant of 'institutionalize'.
- Commit: To send or admit to an institution (e.g., ).
- Confine: To keep or restrict someone within certain limits, often in an institution.
- Formalize: To make official or established (closer to the second meaning).
- Systematize: To arrange according to a system.
- Deinstitutionalize: To remove (a person) from an institution or to abolish an institutional practice.
- Liberate: To set free.
- Disband: To break up or dissolve (an organization or practice).
- "The institutionalized individual": A person who has lived for a very long time within the strict rules of an institution (like a prison or long-term care facility) and may struggle with independence.
- "Institutionalized racism/discrimination": Refers to policies and practices embedded within societal or organizational systems that produce discriminatory outcomes, whether intentionally or not.
- cause to be admitted; of persons to an institution
- After the second episode, she had to be committed
- he was committed to prison