Dictionary

petrolize en · VERB

Etymology

From petrol + -ize.

Meanings

1. (transitive) To treat (water) with kerosene in order to exterminate mosquitoes.
   • Over a four-year period the RF led a large-scale assault on yellow fever's Aedes aegypti mosquito vector, organizing a small army of Mexican and American doctors and local assistants and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to spray, petrolize, drain, fill, and deposit larvicidal fishes in virtually every home, breeding site, and stagnant water source in the region of Veracruz. 2003, Diego Armus, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS:
2. (transitive) To convert into a petroleum-based economy.
   • Despite the efforts taken to forestall them, Mexico found itself with all the symptoms of a “petrolized” economy. 2014, Douglas C. Bennett, Transnational Corporations versus the State:
   • The Mexican economy did not 'petrolize', as happened in Venezuela, since oil production represented only between 10 per cent and 14 per cent of GDP in this period. 2017, Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, editor, The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871, page 302:
   • Once oil accounts for 30 percent of a nation's exports, the money petrolizes the place, the same way human slavery changed Rome, Brazil, and the U.S. South. 2012, Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, page 182:

Forms

Relateds

petrolization