Definition of "rhapsodize"
rhapsodize
verb
third-person singular simple present rhapsodizes, present participle rhapsodizing, simple past and past participle rhapsodized
(intransitive) To speak with exaggerated or rapturous enthusiasm (about, (up)on or over something).
Quotations
The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! […] You will think me rhapsodizing; but when I am out of doors, especially when I am sitting out of doors, I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain.
1814 July, [Jane Austen], chapter IV, in Mansfield Park: […], volume II, London: […] T[homas] Egerton, […], page 76
The Mysteries of Udolpho have been so much laughed at as the type of Gothic absurdity that it is difficult to come at the book with a fresh eye. We come, expecting to ridicule. Then, when we find beauty, as we do, we go to the other extreme and rhapsodize.
1929, Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf, Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf, New York: Harcourt, Brace, published 1958, Phases of Fiction, pages 107–108
King Charles has rhapsodized about the charms of Romania for decades. “There is a sense of age-old continuity here,” he explained in a story last year in The Spectator.
2023 May 1, David Segal, “In Transylvania, Anyone With $200 Can Live Like a King. (Well, One Specific King.)”, in The New York Times
(transitive) To say (something) with exaggerated or rapturous enthusiasm.
Quotations
“It’s a long time since I tasted such a borshtch! Simply a vivifier! It melts in every limb!”" he kept rhapsodizing, between mouthfuls. “It ought to be sent to the Chicago Exposition. The missess would get a medal.”
1896, Abraham Cahan, chapter 5, in Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, New York: Appleton
(transitive) To recount or describe (something) as a rhapsody, or in the manner of a rhapsody.
Quotations
The campaigns themselves will take up as many books; and therefore I apprehend it would be hanging too great a weight of one kind of matter in so flimsy a performance as this, to rhapsodize them, as I once intended, into the body of the work […]
1762, [Laurence Sterne], chapter XXI, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, volume VI, London: […] T. Becket and P. A. Dehondt, […], page 90
(intransitive) To perform a rhapsody.
Quotations
Should one gather statistics of the enormous production of poetry some sixty or seventy years ago, they would scarcely appear credible. Journals and magazines teemed with it. Editors openly countenanced it. Even the daily press affected it. Love sighed in home-made stanzas. Patriotism rhapsodized on the hustings, or cited rolling hexameters to an enraptured legislature.
1911, Stephen Leacock, “The Passing of the Poet”, in Literary Lapses, London: John Lane, page 187