Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To make impure or unclean by contact or mixture.
- transitive verb To expose to or permeate with radioactivity.
- transitive verb Linguistics To influence the semantic properties or phonological form of (a word or phrase); blend with.
- noun One that contaminates; a contaminant.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Contaminated; polluted; defiled; tainted; corrupt.
- To render impure by mixture or contact; defile; pollute; sully; tarnish; taint; corrupt: usually in a figurative sense.
- Synonyms To infect, poison, corrupt. See
taint .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Contaminated; defiled; polluted; tainted.
- transitive verb To soil, stain, or corrupt by contact; to tarnish; to sully; to taint; to pollute; to defile.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To
introduce impurities orforeign matter ; tosoil ordefile .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb make impure
- verb make radioactive by adding radioactive material
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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As the cook cut the melons s/he transferred the contaminate from the outside of the fruit to the inside.
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David Cameron's favourite thinktank, Policy Exchange, published a book-length condemnation which claims that The Spirit Level's authors had produced a shabby, shallow work which threatened to "contaminate" our presumably honest political debate, as if it were an oil slick heading towards a pristine coast.
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To me it recalls the thinking that a drop of African blood in one's heritage was enough to "contaminate" one's whiteness.
La Gloria Cubana 2008
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The authorities had been allowed to "contaminate" the results,
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While local television broadcasts are permitted, cinemas are banned, and Khan rails against Western videos that "contaminate" Islamic and Afghan cultural values.
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That human explorers will "contaminate" Mars is inevitable -- humans contain oceans of bacteria, and a human presence on Mars is sure to leave some behind.
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The guards scrambled to pick up all the leaflets so our message wouldn't "contaminate" the criminals confined in the prison.
On Yankee Station Nichols, Tillman 1988
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The 18,000 Druse and 2,000 Alawites on the Golan would be reunited with their co-religionists, but decades of life under the Zionists will have created social, economic and, yes, political expectations that could "contaminate" the larger Syrian polity.
Jihad Monitor 2010
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This of course raises a question: if shoes are so ritually unclean, just how are these people holding these shoes so as not to 'contaminate' themselves?
Soccer Dad daledamos 2010
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If I were to perform this work and have my LLC send them the bill, would these earnings "contaminate" my passive income thereby screwing up my tax situation?
BiggerPockets Forums 2010
oroboros commented on the word contaminate
conTAmINaTe
April 22, 2008