attenuating

Verb

attenuate (third-person singular simple present attenuates, present participle attenuating, simple past and past participle attenuated)

1. (transitive) To reduce in size, force, value, amount, or degree.
   • A manor-house clock from the far depths of shadow struck the hour, one, in a small, attenuated tone.1874, Thomas Hardy, chapter 40, in Far From the Madding Crowd
2. (transitive) To make thinner, as by physically reshaping, starving, or decaying.
   • Clumps of attenuated turkeys were suspended here and there.1899, Stephen Crane, chapter 4, in His New Mittens
3. (intransitive) To become thin or fine; to grow less.
4. (transitive) To weaken.
   • We may reject and reject till we attenuate history into sapless meagreness.1851, Sir Francis Palgrave, chapter IV, in The History of Normandy and of England
5. (transitive) To rarefy.
   • "It speedily became apparent that the entire strangeness of our circumstances and surroundings—great loss of weight, attenuated but highly oxygenated air, consequent exaggeration of the results of muscular effort, rapid development of weird plants from obscure spores, lurid sky—was exciting my...1900 December – 1901 August, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, chapter 23, in The First Men in the Moon, London: George Newnes, […], published 1901, →OCLC
6. (transitive) To reduce the virulence of a bacterium or virus.

See all 11 meanings of attenuate