fractionate
Americanverb (used with object)
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to separate or divide into component parts, fragments, divisions, etc.
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to separate (a mixture) into ingredients or into portions having different properties, as by distillation or crystallization; cause to undergo fractional distillation, crystallization, or the like.
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to obtain by such a process.
verb
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to separate or cause to separate into constituents or into fractions containing concentrated constituents
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(tr) chem to obtain (a constituent of a mixture) by a fractional process
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of fractionate
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:
"And if there's less precipitation, the isotopes are going to fractionate differently than normal," he said.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 15, 2023
"Then we would carry them up to the 15th floor where we would fractionate and purify them."
From Reuters ● May 5, 2010
Under its most recent chairman, Alabama's easygoing John Sparkman, the committee "had begun to fractionate," says Church, in typically grand language.
From Time Magazine Archive
Then Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr. showed how crude oil could be fractionated into various liquids, one of which was kerosene, an excellent illuminant that was much cheaper than whale oil.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 2, 2026
The Nature Biomedical Engineering study described the material as an intravascularly infused extracellular matrix biomaterial made from decellularized, enzymatically digested, and fractionated ventricular myocardium.
From Science Daily ● May 5, 2026
In this relational void, where the story often feels fractionated rather than woven, the wildfire itself emerges as the book's main character.
From Scientific American ● Jun. 18, 2023
The company hopes that fractionated plasma treatments will be available within a decade.
From The Guardian ● Feb. 2, 2020
The distillate is fractionated, and the portion, boiling between 50° and 60° C., mixed with strong solution of sodium bisulphite.
From Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise by P. Gerald (Percy Gerald) Sanford
The crude oil is heated to high temperatures at the base of a tall fractionating column, vaporizing many of the components that rise within the column.
From Textbooks ● Feb. 14, 2019
It was only decades later that scientists discovered why fractionating doses definitely improves radiation therapy outcomes, and homeopathy had nothing to do with it.
From Slate ● May 4, 2016
But in 1926 University of Chicago Chemist Fred Koch and his assistant Lemuel McGee began dissolving, fractionating and distilling tons of bulls' testicles in an attempt to discover what it is that makes bulls bulls.
From Time Magazine Archive
Fisher believes instead in "fractionating:" breaking the problem down into individual steps, then deciding at each stage what is wanted from the adversary and determining what he can reasonably be expected to give.
From Time Magazine Archive
The liquid there heated and changed state, rising as vapor through the fractionating column to catch in the condenser and trickle in droplets into the collection flask.
From "Strange the Dreamer" by Laini Taylor
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.
