Definitions

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

  • transitive & intransitive verb To make or become ethereal.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To make ethereal; purify and refine; spiritualize. Also spelled etherealise.

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

  • transitive verb To convert into ether, or into subtile fluid; to saturate with ether.
  • transitive verb To render ethereal or spiritlike.

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

  • verb transitive To make ethereal.

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

  • verb make ethereal

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The long tendency of sentimental fiction to etherealize the heroine can hardly survive against this gust of earthy comedy

    'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's _Juvenilia_ 2006

  • Angels, as some represent them, even in whole lengths, are by _anatomists_ regarded as _monsters_; but what then are the chubby winged heads _without bodies_, with which some artists etherealize their works.

    The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 12, No. 341, November 15, 1828 Various

  • Study Perugino and Raphael, see how they raise human nature and etherealize it till we see the divinity of soul in the faces of their saints and martyrs.

    Fra Bartolommeo Scott, Leader, 1837-1902 1881

  • Study Perugino and Raphael, see how they raise human nature and etherealize it till we see the divinity of soul in the faces of their saints and martyrs.

    Fra Bartolommeo Leader Scott 1869

  • It was a bright, cheerful apartment, giving upon the laurels of the rocky hillside, and permeated, like the rest of the house, with the wholesome spice of the valley -- an odor that, in its pure desiccating property, seemed to obliterate all flavor of alien human habitation, and even to dominate and etherealize the appetizing smell of the viands before them.

    A Phyllis of the Sierras Bret Harte 1869

  • At midnight few scenes could be more calm and beautiful, so tenderly did the light of the moon soften and etherealize everything.

    His Sombre Rivals Edward Payson Roe 1863

  • Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual, the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life.

    Pearls of Thought Maturin Murray Ballou 1857

  • _pneumatichon_, his real thought evidently being that of a _body spiritualized_; so some, remembering that "the letter killeth," would etherealize Scripture by telling us that the divine idea is the chief thing, and the language quite secondary.

    The Ministry of the Spirit 1865

  • a question which has stirred the heart of mankind to its foundations -- can Women etherealize society?

    Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 342, April, 1844 Various

  • "We need not agree with a certain modern school who would empty all poetry of poetical thought and etherealize it till it melts into a strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know of what, but in such a way that the echoes of the real world, its men and women, its actual stir and conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned.

    A Study of Poetry Bliss Perry 1907

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