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rarefied

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Alternative forms

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Adjective

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rarefied (comparative more rarefied, superlative most rarefied)

  1. Distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select.
    Philosophical debates can be quite rarefied.
    • 1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXXIV, in Middlemarch [], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book IV:
      The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below.
    • 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter II, in The Lost World [], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
      Of course, Beaumont was the real boss; but he lived in the rarefied atmosphere of some Olympian height from which he could distinguish nothing smaller than an international crisis or a split in the Cabinet.
    • 1977 April 30, David Holland, John Rechy, “The Politics of 'The Sexual Outlaw'”, in Gay Community News, page 9:
      I'm not taking the stand of any moralist. I have done the whole S&M route: the costumes and all, so I'm not talking from any rarified point — that's very important. That I have experienced it, that I have lived it.
    • 2023 April 29, Lou Stoppard, “Inside the world of the elite nanny”, in FT Weekend:
      One day, she had to present the children, dressing them formally and introducing them by their full titles, ahead of high tea with extended family. It had been a crash course into the rarefied world in which some Norland charges live.
  2. Elevated in style or nature, sublime; of high intellectual or moral value.
  3. (of a gas etc.) Less dense than usual; thin.
    The air at high altitudes at the top of mountains is rarefied.

Translations

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Verb

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rarefied

  1. simple past and past participle of rarefy