1. to address someone or something that is not present, dead, or inanimate as if it could respond
Usage: literary; rhetoric

Examples

• The poet apostrophizes the moon in the opening stanza.
• In his grief, he apostrophized his deceased father.
• Shakespeare often has his characters apostrophize abstract concepts like love or death.
• The speaker apostrophizes the wind, asking it to carry her message.
• During the soliloquy, Hamlet apostrophizes his father’s ghost.
• The author apostrophizes nature throughout the romantic poem.