| 释义 |
aˈttenuated, ppl. a.
[f. attenuate v. + -ed.]
1. Made thin or slender in girth or transverse thickness (by natural shaping, mechanical reduction, starving, or wasting); tapered off; fine-drawn.
1677Plot Oxfordsh. 107 From the basis there issue..five tails of serpents, waved and attenuated. 1742Young Nt. Th. i. 179 The spider's most attenuated thread. 1840Hood Up Rhine (1869) 250 The venerable pastor thrust his attenuated fingers into the flame. 1853Kane Grinnell Exp. I. (1856) 484 As attenuated as parchment.
2. Made thin in consistency; rarefied, diluted.
c1610Chapman Hymne to Hermes 58 Steele..did raise..the attenuated baies To that hot vapor. 1635N. Carpenter Geog. Del. ii. ix. 148 The vapours are too much attenuated and rarified. 1823Lamb Elia i. iii, Attenuated small beer. 1874Moseley Astron. lxix. 202 A huge ring of attenuated matter..girds the planet. 1876C. M. Davies Unorth. Lond. 74 That most attenuated of all things, the shadow of a shade.
fig.1827Gent. Mag. XCVII. ii. 494 A more attenuated and enlarged standard of thought.
3. Weakened in intensity, force, effect, value.
1828Carlyle Misc. (1857) I. 217 A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had taken place of the old insular home feeling. 1882Manch. Guard. 22 Sept. 5 An ‘attenuated’ or modified bacteria. |