REFINING • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Refining

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/rəfˈaɪnɪŋ/ /rɪfˈaɪnɪŋ/ Listen

verb

Refine v. t. (past & past part. refined; pres. part. refining)

To reduce to a fine, unmixed, or pure state; to free from impurities; to free from dross or alloy; to separate from extraneous matter; to purify; to defecate; as, to refine gold or silver; to refine iron; to refine wine or sugar. "I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined."

To purify from what is gross, coarse, vulgar, inelegant, low, and the like; to make elegant or exellent; to polish; as, to refine the manners, the language, the style, the taste, the intellect, or the moral feelings. "Love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges."

Synonyms: To purify; clarify; polish; ennoble.

Refine v. i.

To become pure; to be cleared of feculent matter. "So the pure, limpid stream, when foul with stains, Works itself clear, and, as it runs, refines."

To improve in accuracy, delicacy, or excellence. "Chaucer refined on Boccace, and mended his stories." "But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! How the style refines!"

To affect nicety or subtilty in thought or language. "He makes another paragraph about our refining in controversy."

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Etymology of 'Refining'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Refining" Quotes from Famous Books

... feeling of dramatic effect not less wonderful. The very passages in which Lady Macbeth displays the most savage and relentless determination, are so worded as to fill the mind with the idea of sex, and place the woman before us in all her dearest attributes, at once softening and refining the horror, and rendering it more intense. Thus, when she reproaches her husband ...

— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... worthy veterans who honored Greenville with their presence was the proud father of Warren G. Harding, of Marion, Ohio. All were delighted with the lovely St. Clair Memorial Hall, whose classic beauty makes it an elevating and refining influence in the community. Then, too, the well kept library, with its fine museum containing the old original treaty of the Indians and many other interesting relics, will ...

— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... stimulating—or if so, at times, it stimulates only the imagination and the social faculties. It lulls to sleep the combative and destructive propensities, and hence—so far as a material agent may operate—it exercises a humanizing and refining influence. A profound student of Man, whose name is well known to the world, once informed me that he saw in the eagerness with which savage tribes adopt the use of Tobacco, a spontaneous ...

— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... in its present expression may often lead to uncongenial marriages and even involve dysgenic mating, its aesthetic and refining influences are such as to make it desirable in spite of these drawbacks. Its influence upon literature has been noted by Bloch[2] while its potency in the formation of a deep and tender feeling between men and women has been elaborately discussed by Finck.[4] Thus it is evident that ...

— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... stool. In the midst of these guts is situated the mesenterium or midriff, composed of many veins, arteries, and much fat, serving chiefly to sustain the guts. All these parts serve the first concoction. To the second, which is busied either in refining the good nourishment or expelling the bad, is chiefly belonging the liver, like in colour to congealed blood, the shop of blood, situate in the right hypochondry, in figure like to a half-moon, generosum membrum Melancthon styles it, a generous part; it serves to turn the ...

— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

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