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:
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
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.
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
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
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
My body was subtilized, or rather became volatile, and commingled in a state of atomic vapor, with the prodigious clouds, which rushed forward like a mighty comet into infinite space!
From A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
"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
Still, all inward life works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture cannot go very far before the religious graces reappear in it in a subtilized intellectual shape.
From English Critical Essays Nineteenth Century by Edmund David Jones
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
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
But Mr. Arabin went on subtilizing, regarding neither the archdeacon's raillery nor Eleanor's defence.
From Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Theosophy—and a large share of what is called theology—is simply a refining and subtilizing of mythology.
From The Next Step in Religion An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance by Roy Wood Sellars
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
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