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

Our condensers, which compress, cool, and rarefy air, enabling travellers to obtain water and even ice from the atmosphere, are great aids in desert exploration, removing absolutely the principal distress of the ancient caravan.

From A journey in other worlds A romance of the future by John Jacob Astor

The markings, always spots and specks, the largest never exceeding 0·1 inch in diameter, are invariably most numerous towards the large end, where they are sometimes, though rarefy, slightly confluent.

From The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 by Allan Octavian Hume

If he wanted to join the rarefied air of the sons and daughters of The 400, he couldn’t be seen associated with anyone who would count as a mark against his judgment.

From Salon ● Oct. 28, 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

A decorative hanger-on, dependent on her rich friends and relatives, she is now 29 and still single when many more ordinary women in her rarefied New York circle have made successful matches.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 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

When I first arrived in Mqhekezweni I was regarded by some of my peers as a yokel who was hopelessly unequipped to exist in the rarefied atmosphere of the Great Place.

From "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela

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

These tubercles may be present in large numbers at the expense of the living tissue, and a rarefying ostitis is thus produced.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Slice 2 "Bohemia" to "Borgia, Francis" by Various

A head of one hundred and eighty degrees is sufficient to diminish the weight of the air it contains to the extent of one-half, by rarefying it.

From Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne

Good again! the hot-water plate represents the land rarefying the air over it.

From No Name by Wilkie Collins

On rarefying the gas still more, a few large ramifications were obtained of a pale bluish colour, utterly unlike those in nitrogen.

From Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 by Michael Faraday