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 Hawthorne, Nathaniel
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 Johnson, Samuel
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 Cook, Martha Elizabeth Duncan Walker
However abstractly they speculate and subtilize, there is always an undigested bone of man-god, god-man, and vicarious atonement in the theological stomach.
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 Verne, Jules
Calvert says: "Ladyhood is an emanation from the heart subtilized by culture;" giving as two requisites for the highest breeding, transmitted qualities and the culture of good training.
From Our Deportment Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society by Young, John H.
The sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.
From The Return of the Prodigal by Sinclair, May
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 Flitch, J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford)
In the past all his experiences were refined, subtilized, transfigured.
From Hazlitt on English Literature An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature by Zeitlin, Jacob
"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 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
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 Sinclair, May
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 Calvert, George H. (George Henry)
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
By subtilizing, the modern theologian becomes as little intelligible to himself as to others.
From Superstition In All Ages (1732) Common Sense by Knoop, Anna
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.
