Word of the Day:
fractionate
What It Means
To separate (a mixture) into its individual constituents by exploiting differences in some chemical or physical property, such as boiling point, particle size, solubility etc.
To divide a total dose of radiation into fractions.
To divide each plaintext symbol into several ciphertext symbols as a preliminary stage of encryption.
Crude oil is fractionated in a refinery to produce a number of different petroleum products.
Did You Know?
From fraction + -ate (verb-forming suffix).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fractionate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “fractionate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fractionate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
