Word.ws English Dictionary

rarefied

rarefied adjective: distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select. Also the simple past and past participle of rarefy.

Adjective

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.
    • 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.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
  2. Elevated in style or nature, sublime; of high intellectual or moral value.
  3. Less dense than usual; thin.
    • The air at high altitudes at the top of mountains is rarefied.

Also used as

rarefied is also the simple past and past participle of rarefy.

Examples of rarefied in a sentence

  • But wine, that most rarefied of libations, has been a little slower to the sober-curious party.
  • An earlier and slightly mysterious version of Betteridge's law applies to the rarefied world of particle physics.
  • From this rarefied dataset, alpha diversity was estimated in two ways using QIIME v1.8: observed species and phylodiversity.

All 10 example sentences with rarefied

Forms of rarefied

comparativemore rarefied
superlativemost rarefied
alternative formrarified

Words formed from rarefied

Questions about rarefied

What does rarefied mean?
Rarefied means distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select.
What part of speech is rarefied?
Rarefied is an adjective.

Words near rarefied in the dictionary

  1. rarefactive
  2. rarefacts
  3. rarefiable
  4. rarefication
  5. rarefications
  6. rarefied
  7. rarefier
  8. rarefiers
  9. rarefies
  10. rarefieth
  11. rarefy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rarefied (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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