To standardize something is to make all the examples of it the same, by choosing one way and making everybody follow it. A company standardizes its packaging so every box is the same size. A country standardizes its school tests so every student sits the same paper. The thing you standardize is usually a group of things that grew up separately and ended up different from each other — different sizes, different spellings, different steps — and the work is deciding on one version and pushing the rest into it. There is a second, quieter use: you can standardize a single thing against a fixed measure, the way a lab standardizes a machine so its readings match everyone else's. The word carries a feeling of large organizations doing the deciding — factories, governments, schools, industries — so it sounds official rather than personal. You would not usually say you standardized your own breakfast, though people do say it as a joke, and that joke works precisely because the word is normally so institutional. British writing often spells it standardise; the two are the same word. Note also that standardizing is not automatically praise: people say a system has been standardized when they mean it is efficient, and they say the same when they mean it has lost all its local character. Which one they mean is in their tone, not in the word.