The AI-powered English dictionary
comparative more rarefied, superlative most rarefied
Distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select. quotations examples
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 […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, book IV
Of course, Beaumont was the real boss; but he lived in the rarefied atmosphere of some Olympian height from which he could distinguish nothing smaller than an international crisis or a split in the Cabinet.
1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter II, in The Lost World […], London, New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton
One day, she had to present the children, dressing them formally and introducing them by their full titles, ahead of high tea with extended family. It had been a crash course into the rarefied world in which some Norland charges live.
2023 April 29, Lou Stoppard, “Inside the world of the elite nanny”, in FT Weekend
Elevated in style or nature, sublime; of high intellectual or moral value. examples
(of a gas etc.) Less dense than usual; thin. examples
simple past and past participle of rarefy examples