1728 E. Chambers Cycl. (at cited word) Personifying is essential to Poetry, especially the Epopea.

1844 Southern Lit. Messenger 440/1 A spiritualizing and personifying of nature, which nature-worship is probably the foundation of ideology.

1892 Cent. Mag. Dec. 275/1 To suppose that God is a personifying of our emotions does not appear to me reasonable.

1903 J. A. Crowe & G. B. Cavelcaselle Early Christian Art i. 14 Under Leo..design seems to have had no better aim than the personifying of the might of the Redeemer, by stature and girth superior to that of the attendants.

1957 J. A. W. Bennett Parlement of Foules (1965) i. 17 In the Parlement the most obvious conventional devices are the dream-setting.., the personifying of the accompaniments of love, [etc.]

1992 H. A. Bosmajian Metaphor & Reason in Judicial Opinions 6 The personifying of the Constitution had already begun in the nineteenth century when Justice John Harlan declared..that the ‘Constitution is colorblind’.

1804 W. Scott in Edinb. Rev. Apr. 227 The descriptive and personifying powers exerted in the poems of Rowley.

1852 U.S. Democratic Rev. Apr. 349/1 Nor would it be out of the usual course for the personifying spirit of the Roman poets.

1873 M. Arnold Lit. & Dogma i. 42 (note) If this personifying mode of expression is more proper and adequate, it must also be more scientifically exact.

1957 J. S. Huxley Relig. without Revelation I. 19 The personifying tendency.

1991 Fremdsprachen 35 29/1 Consider e.g. a sentence like ‘Der Name sagt mir nichts’. Why should we assume that the English ‘tell’ is any more personifying than this ‘sagen’.