distill
Americanverb (used with object)
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distils,
present (3rd person singular)
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distilled,
past participle, past
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distilling
present participle
-
to subject to a process of vaporization and subsequent condensation, as for purification or concentration.
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to extract the volatile components of by distillation; transform by distillation.
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to concentrate, purify, or obtain by or as by distillation.
to distill whiskey from mash.
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to remove by distillation (usually followed by off orout ).
to distill out impurities.
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to extract the essential elements of; refine; abstract.
She managed to distill her ideas into one succinct article.
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to let fall in drops; give forth in or as in drops.
The cool of the night distills the dew.
verb (used without object)
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distils,
present (3rd person singular)
-
distilled,
past participle, past
-
distilling
present participle
-
to undergo or perform distillation.
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to become vaporized and then condensed in distillation.
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to drop, pass, or condense as a distillate.
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to fall in drops; trickle; exude.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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redistillablenessnoun
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redistillverb (used with object)
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distillableadjective
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nondistillableadjective
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redistillableadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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distillsimple
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distilssimple
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have distilledperfect
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has distilledperfect
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am distillingprogressive
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are distillingprogressive
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is distillingprogressive
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have been distillingperfect progressive
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has been distillingperfect progressive
Past
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distilledsimple
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had distilledperfect
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was distillingprogressive
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were distillingprogressive
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had been distillingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of distill
First recorded in 1325–75; Middle English distillen (from Anglo-French distiller ), from Latin distillāre, variant of dēstillāre, equivalent to dē- de- + stillāre to drip
Explanation
When you distill something, you are boiling it down to its essence — its most important part. Whether it's alcohol or ideas, the distilled part is the most powerful. The original meaning of distill comes from the process of making alcohol, known as distilling, in which all the impurities of a substance are vaporized and its pure, high-alcohol condensation collected. Distill eventually came to mean any process in which the essence of something is revealed. If you take notes at a lecture and then turn them into an essay for your professor, you're distilling your notes into something more pure and exact. At least, that's what you hope you're doing.
Vocabulary lists containing distill
The Cay
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "D"
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Life As We Knew It
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
A.I.-powered diagnostics distill all of this into one clear picture of your entire body, in 360-degree, piercing-into-the-soul, high-resolution detail.
From Slate ● Oct. 8, 2026
Scientists then distill that blood into antivenom for humans.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 21, 2026
Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 model has upended this discussion because it earned higher scores in many benchmarks than Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, the most powerful model it could distill.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 20, 2026
Like any good pastor, he knows how to distill that discontent into soundbites and stories.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 30, 2026
And he’s trying to distill all of these ideas into easily digestible chunks—science meets pop science.
From "A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age" by Matt Richtel
The report, culminating a two-year evaluation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement goals, distils thousands of submissions from experts, governments and campaigners.
From Reuters ● Sep. 8, 2023
Being forced to use simple language distils her experiences down to the bare truths, adding to their starkness.
From BBC ● May 14, 2022
Sullivan says that the result he is proudest of is one he obtained in 1977, which distils the crucial properties of a space using a tool called rational homotopy.
From Scientific American ● Mar. 28, 2022
The OSP distils those data down to a single metric called the teaching score, which indicates how often a text is assigned in syllabuses.
From Nature ● Oct. 30, 2016
Well, there may be a poison that distils itself out of good things; in an age when the existence of ptomaines is a mystery we should not wonder at anything!
From "Dracula" by Bram Stoker
White wine vinegar — or even plain distilled white vinegar — is excellent with potatoes, creamy chicken soups and corn chowders.
From Salon ● Oct. 5, 2026
Scent is “memory, mood and emotion, distilled into something you can’t see but never forget,” Air Aroma said in a Facebook post earlier this year.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 3, 2026
It’s distilled and matured in the Canadian province of Manitoba, but then shipped in large containers to bottling facilities in the U.S. for distribution to American customers.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 9, 2026
He distilled the disagreement into the dissent’s sharpest line.
From Slate ● Sep. 1, 2026
The only part of his formula I know is that he uses distilled water for his ice and distills it himself to be sure.
From "Travels with Charley in Search of America" by John Steinbeck
The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously "distilling" that data to improve their own models.
From Barron's ● Sep. 11, 2026
On that last track, recorded a dozen years ago, Mr. Lloyd, playing alto sax, seems like a fountain, distilling fragments of songs and scales into a narrative that spills forth in graceful gushes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026
Microsoft is weighing whether to host a version of DeepSeek, an ultralow-cost AI provider based in China that OpenAI and Anthropic have called out for distilling, or copying, their top models.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 22, 2026
John D. Rockefeller was 24 in 1863 when he invested in the emerging new technology of distilling crude into kerosene.
From Barron's ● May 2, 2026
By the evening of that day Napoleon was back at work, and on the next day it was learned that he had instructed Whymper to purchase in Willingdon some booklets on brewing and distilling.
From "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story" by George Orwell
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
