Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Capable of dissolving a substance; solvent.
  • noun A solvent.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having power to dissolve; solvent.
  • noun A solvent.
  • noun That which disintegrates, breaks up, or loosens.
  • noun In medicine, a remedy supposed to be capable of dissolving concretions in the body, such as calculi, tubercles, etc.; a resolvent.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun That which has the power of dissolving or melting other substances, esp. by mixture with them; a menstruum; a solvent.
  • noun (Med.) A remedy supposed capable of dissolving concretions in the body, such as calculi, tubercles, etc.
  • adjective Having power to dissolve power to dissolve a solid body.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Capable of dissolution into a fluid.
  • noun A substance which can (be) dissolve(d) into a liquid

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a liquid substance capable of dissolving other substances

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • Conversely, the kind of bipartisan cooperation voters are supposedly clamoring for today seemed to them, again correctly as the evidence shows, a deterrent to voter turnout and a dissolvent of internal party unity.

    Party rivalry past and present 2010

  • Pornography has been deliberately used as a social and political dissolvent during periods of revolutionary change.

    Pornography and Deicide elena maria vidal 2009

  • It would seem to be necessary that the author who is to stand as a distinct and imperative individual among the company of those who express the world's thought should come to a hard crystallization before subjecting himself to the tense strain of cities, the dissolvent acids of critical circles.

    How Books Become Immortal 2006

  • It would seem to be necessary that the author who is to stand as a distinct and imperative individual among the company of those who express the world's thought should come to a hard crystallization before subjecting himself to the tense strain of cities, the dissolvent acids of critical circles.

    How Books Become Immortal 2006

  • Incapable of being duped! that horrid maxim is the dissolvent of all noble sentiments in man.

    Modeste Mignon 2007

  • The two streams of dissolvent influences, negative criticism on the one hand, and positive knowledge and scientific method on the other, were led into a single channel of multiplied volume and force.

    Voltaire 2007

  • Protestantism in the sixteenth century, if it could have been accepted in France, would have been a more edifying dissolvent than Voltairism was in the eighteenth; but it is certain that the loosening of theological ideas and the organization connected with them and upholding them, was the first process towards making truly social ideas possible, and their future realization a thing which good men might hope for.

    Voltaire 2007

  • These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but a curious and pleasantly faded memory.

    In the Days of the Comet Herbert George 2006

  • Thereupon also, two things should not surprise us: first, that forced equality – as ever it must be – is the dissolvent of profitable social relations; and second, that individual responsibility is the glue that binds us together.

    Archive 2005-09-01 2005

  • Thereupon also, two things should not surprise us: first, that forced equality – as ever it must be – is the dissolvent of profitable social relations; and second, that individual responsibility is the glue that binds us together.

    Curmudgeon Ahoy! 2005

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