Definitions

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

  • verb Third-person singular simple present indicative form of rarefy.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Dioscor. wonders the physicians of his time made no more use of it, because it rarefies and cleanseth: we use it to this purpose in our ordinary beer, which before was thick and fulsome.

    Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

  • Besides, they say dough will be leavened sooner in the full, for then, though the leaven is scarce proportioned to the meal, yet it rarefies and leavens the whole lump.

    Essays and Miscellanies 2004

  • Lastly, it is very possible that apples and dry figs exhale some such thing as this, which rarefies and attenuates the heat of the beasts; for some things have a natural tendency as well to weaken as to refresh different creatures.

    Essays and Miscellanies 2004

  • Besides, they say dough will be leavened sooner in the full, for then, though the leaven is scarce proportioned to the meal, yet it rarefies and leavens the whole lump.

    Symposiacs 2004

  • Lastly, it is very possible that apples and dry figs exhale some such thing as this, which rarefies and attenuates the heat of the beasts; for some things have a natural tendency as well to weaken as to refresh different creatures.

    Symposiacs 2004

  • For example, I know that the heat of the sun during the day rarefies the air over the land, and so causes the wind.

    No Name 2003

  • The sun is necessarily obscured and darkened when the evaporation which dissolves and rarefies the air begins to withdraw into the earth.

    Meteorology 2002

  • And why should the left cavity of the heart and the great artery be wider and larger than the right cavity and the arterial vein, were it not that the blood of the venous artery, having only been in the lungs after it has passed through the heart, is thinner, and rarefies more readily, and in a higher degree, than the blood which proceeds immediately from the hollow vein?

    Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences 2002

  • Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's".

    English literary criticism Various

  • Now, as this metal disc is attracted or released by the current coming over the wire, it compresses or rarefies the air between it and the ear-drum of the person to whose oral cavity it is held.

    The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone Richard Bonner

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