phrenologizev.
/frᵻˈnɒlədʒʌɪz/, U.S. /frəˈnɑləˌdʒaɪz/ 1.
a. transitive. To examine or analyse phrenologically. Now chiefly historical.
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the mind > mental capacity > psychology > faculty psychology > psychological study of the skull > examine phrenologically [verb (transitive)]
phrenologize1830
1830 T. Wade Phrenologists ii. i. 34 I shall feel more comfortable when I have them under lock and key: we'll phrenologize them both.
1846 B. R. Hall Something for Every Body 6 Every meadow has been measured, every water befished;..every thing galvanized, phrenologized, mesmerized.
1895 Daily News 22 Nov. 4/7 Burns's skull was phrenologised.
1951 C. Gohdes in A. H. Quinn Lit. Amer. People iii. xxx. 608 The firm of Fowler and Wells, in whose New York office he had been phrenologized in 1849.
1999 Newsday (N.Y.) (Nexis) 28 May a18 By the time the ‘science’ had been discredited around the turn of the century, a long list of prominent people had been phrenologized.
b. transitive. humorous. To produce bumps on by blows. rare.
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1848 Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. 63 262 You emerged with a broken hat, and a head phrenologised by a blacking bottle.
2002 Miami Herald (Nexis) 18 Feb. 1 c There's an expression I discovered from research, which means to hit someone in the head... It's ‘I phrenologized him.’
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the mind > mental capacity > psychology > faculty psychology > psychological study of the skull > examine phrenologically [verb (transitive)] > treat phrenologically
phrenologize1858
1858 J. W. Donaldson Lit. Greece III. 13 He not only made the soul a mere function of the body, but even phrenologized it by placing it in the forehead.
1885 Mind 10 246 To restrict the freedom of the soul, and to dualise, if not to phrenologise, it into a posterior and an anterior soul.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2006; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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