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.
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
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
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
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
He is neither subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman by social laws and prejudices.
From Tragic Sense Of Life by J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford) Flitch
Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.
From Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. (William Henry) Hudson
And when the soul has subtilized itself, until it can penetrate them, it arrives at the word, that is, at perfect will; and then its motion ceases, and its joy remains.
From Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 3 by Hamilton Wright Mabie
Gold was the soil converted into money, the soil mobilized, exchangeable, transportable, divisible, subtilized, spiritualized, as it were.
From The Companions of Jehu by Alexandre Dumas père
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
How! cries the metaphysician, the subtilizing philosopher, what! refuse to the Divinity, those qualities we discover in his creatures?
From The System of Nature, Volume 2 by Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach
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
And because that reality must weigh more heavily on him than her, she was trying to defend him too, against himself, to force on him, against himself, her own subtilizing, justifying view.
From The Divine Fire by May Sinclair
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