subtilize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to elevate in character; sublimate.
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to make (the mind, senses, etc.) keen or discerning; sharpen.
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to introduce subtleties into or argue subtly about.
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to make thin, rare, or more fluid or volatile; refine.
verb (used without object)
verb
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(tr) to bring to a purer state; refine
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to debate subtly
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(tr) to make (the mind, etc) keener
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of subtilize
1585–95; < Medieval Latin subtīlizāre, equivalent to subtīl ( is ) subtle + -izāre -ize
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:
However abstractly they speculate and subtilize, there is always an undigested bone of man-god, god-man, and vicarious atonement in the theological stomach.
By long brooding over our recollections, we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable of being distinguished from it.
From The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
To play with important truths, to disturb the repose of established tenets, to subtilize objections, and elude proof, is too often the sport of youthful vanity, of which maturer experience commonly repents.
From The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume 06 Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons by Samuel Johnson
Almost suffocating under the oppression of repressed feelings, using art only to repeat and rehearse for himself his own internal tragedy, after having wearied emotion, he began to subtilize it.
From Life of Chopin by Martha Elizabeth Duncan Walker Cook
Every page bears the impress of thought, but it is thought subtilized, and redolent of poetry.
From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 22, August, 1859 by Various
In analyzing the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that it represents nothing at all, and at the same time the problems that have been raised around it will vanish.
From Creative Evolution by Arthur Mitchell
The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain.
From Browning and His Century by Helen Archibald Clarke
In the past all his experiences were refined, subtilized, transfigured.
From Hazlitt on English Literature An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature by Jacob Zeitlin
Monsieur Pradel, it is imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists of coming night.
From A Mummer's Tale by Charles E. Roche
"Seest thou not," adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being into power, and dividing the Logos into two.
From Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Beside it relieved me from a multitude of labours and cares, for, as I proceeded, Thomas Aquinas and his subtilizing competitors were thrown by in contempt.
From The Adventures of Hugh Trevor by Thomas Holcroft
The scene is transfigured before their eyes: it is as if the heavens had opened, and inundated all its features with a celestial subtilizing aura.
From Essays Æsthetical by George H. (George Henry) Calvert
The risk in subtilizing stage character lies just here.
From How to See a Play by Sir Richard Francis Burton
These were concessions to a ruling mode,—concessions the more readily made, owing to their being in complete harmony with the strong subtilizing and allegorizing tendencies of Dante's own mind.
From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 15, January, 1859 by Various
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.
