rarefy

Although these sculptures pay tribute to commercialism, they rarefy it to something austere — or at least as austere as anything with pulsing green lights can be.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 19, 2018

Of course it’s serious, and art is serious, but I’m not going to rarefy it.”

From New York Times ● Dec. 16, 2011

It contains moist air and a movable diaphragm or piston to rarefy it suddenly.

From Time Magazine Archive

But extend this vapour, rarefy it; from so narrow a room as our natural bodies, to any politic body, to a state.

From Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions Together with Death's Duel by John Donne

But as such means are not at disposal, it becomes necessary to place the terminal in a bulb and rarefy the air in the same.

From Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency by Nikola Tesla

She is aware that she’s had a rarefied career.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 14, 2026

In the same way that regional brands like Shake Shack and In-N-Out have maintained cult followings for their novelty, Cane’s has no doubt benefited from the same kind of rarefied air.

From Slate ● Aug. 24, 2026

The analytics website Data Golf has metrics that rate amateur players going back to 2010—and Koivun tops a list that puts him in rarefied company.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 2026

His mental adjustment on how to react to failure, combined with a conditioning program that led him to lose 10 pounds and become faster and stronger, created a spring environment sending him into rarefied air.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 7, 2026

Mary also knew that a native of a place so flat it was practically underwater would need a leg up before hiking for days in the rarefied altitude of the Wyoming mountains.

From "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly

After rarefying to 5,000 sequences per sample, a total of 307,572 unique sequences were contained in the 96 studies and 23,828 samples of the ‘QC-filtered’ Deblur 90-bp observation table.

From Nature ● Oct. 31, 2017

And here, it is proper to add, that all aromatics, by rarefying the blood, are cordial.

From A Treatise on Foreign Teas Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, Entitled An Essay On the Nerves by Hugh Smith

Funnels for clearing ships' holds of foul air, on the principle of the rarefying power of heat.

From The Sailor's Word-Book An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, including Some More Especially Military and Scientific, but Useful to Seamen; as well as Archaisms of Early Voyagers, etc. by Sir Edward Belcher

And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarefying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks in my cheeks.

From Brigands of the Moon by Ray Cummings

On rarefying the gas, the formation of the brush was facilitated, but it was generally of a low squat form, very poor in light, and very similar on both the positive and negative surfaces.

From Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 by Michael Faraday