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:
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
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
"And if I don't pay you the doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."
From My Friend Prospero by Henry Harland
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
The sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.
From The Return of the Prodigal by May Sinclair
Except that the houses had receded and faded, and the passers-by were subtilized into unnoticeable ghosts!
From The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
But Aristotle did not consider the "pneuma," which thus reached the interior of the blood-vessels, to be exactly the same thing as air—it was "a subtilized and condensed air."
From Fathers of Biology by Charles McRae
Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers.
From The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
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
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
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
"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
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.
