Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To reduce to powder; pulverize.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Divided into small parts; comminuted.
- To make small or fine; reduce to minute particles or to a fine powder by breaking, pounding, braying, rasping, or grinding; pulverize; triturate, levigate.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To reduce to minute particles, or to a fine powder; to pulverize; to triturate; to grind.
- transitive verb See under
Fracture .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To
pulverize ; to smash. - verb To cause fragmentation of bone, an intense
skull fracture . - verb To break into smaller portions.
- noun
pulverized material
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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For here again it is because the mouth fails to perform its office and fails even more completely-for birds have no teeth at all, nor any instrument whatsoever with which to comminute or grind down their food-it is,
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The stomach is well muscled and churns the food about, helping to comminute it, but it can not take the place of the teeth.
Maintaining Health Formerly Health and Efficiency R. L. Alsaker
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Even after taking all possible precautions to finely comminute these substances by mechanical means, still only imperfect results are obtained, for the impurities, that is to say, the sand, can never be so intimately mixed with the lighter particles that a sample of 0.5 to
Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 Various
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Again in some multiple injuries, pain was only felt in the more sensitive of the regions implicated; thus a patient in whom a bullet (Martini) traversed the arm and chest emerging in the neck to again enter the chin and comminute the mandible, only felt pain in the chin and first realised that he had been wounded elsewhere when he undressed.
Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 Being Mainly a Clinical Study of the Nature and Effects of Injuries Produced by Bullets of Small Calibre George Henry Makins
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That the stomach is fully able to comminute the food may be proved by the following calculation.
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* In exceptional cases it may be necessary to comminute a large foreign body such as a tooth plate.
Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery Chevalier Jackson 1911
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He explained that he had introduced a chisel through his perineal fistula to the stone, and attempted to comminute it himself and thus remove it, and by so doing had removed about an ounce of the calculus.
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He explained that he had introduced a chisel through his perineal fistula to the stone, and attempted to comminute it himself and thus remove it, and by so doing had removed about an ounce of the calculus.
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That the stomach is fully able to comminute the food may be proved by the following calculation.
The Evolution of Modern Medicine A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913 William Osler 1884
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This would involve a large amount of unnecessary physiological labor, to comminute, dissolve, and absorb the food, and to excrete the superfluous nitrogenous matter.
The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand Ray Vaughn Pierce 1877
hernesheir commented on the word comminute
Some paleobotanists study plant remains that have been abraded or degraded into microscopic fragments preserved in rocks and sediments. In the paleobotanical literature one can find references to such fragments described as being comminuted, macerated, or masticated, depending on whether the remains were broken up by mechanical means such as stream transport, wave action, or natural decay (comminuted or macerated) or by chewing and digestive processes (masticated).
December 31, 2008