enolize

• enolise

From enol +‎ -ize.

enolize (third-person singular simple present enolizes, present participle enolizing, simple past and past participle enolized)

1. (organic chemistry, intransitive) To become an enol or enolate, often through isomerization.
   • 1993, Richard O.C. Norman, James M. Coxon, Principles of Organic Synthesis, 3rd Edition, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 258:

     As in base-catalyzed reactions, crossed reactions between two carbonyl compounds each of which can enolize are likely to result in a mixture of four products.

   • 2000, Derek Horton, Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biochemistry, Gulf Professional Publishing, →ISBN, page 185:

     These differences have been attributed to the ability of free saccharides to enolize in basic media and to the resistance of hydrazones to do so, as detailed next.

   • 2005, Thomas Laue, Andreas Plagens, Named Organic Reactions, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 160:

     The phosphorus tribromide is then formed in situ. Carboxylic acids that enolize easily will also react without a catalyst present.

   • 2014, Penny Chaloner, Organic Chemistry: A Mechanistic Approach, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 798:

     If we condense two species where one cannot enolize, then this principle reduces our number of primary products to two.

   • 2016, Paul D. Boyer, Henry Lardy, Karl Myrbäck, Group Transfer Syntheses Coupled to ATP Cleavage, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 217:

     Pyruvate is known to enolize rapidly under the conditions employed by Oshima and Tamiya; in contrast, the a-keto analogs of a number of other amino acids enolize at much slower rates.

2. (organic chemistry, transitive) To convert into an enol or enolate.
   • 1999, Enzyme Kinetics and Mechanisms, Part E, Energetics of Enzyme Catalysis, Academic Press, →ISBN, page 23:

     It was thus proposed that the matched pK values of the dienolate and of Tyr-14 permitted the hydrogen bond between them to become a very strong one, thus providing the energy to enolize the substrate and form the unstable intermediate.

• enolization
• enolizable