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/pˈɛnətrˌeɪt/ Listen

verb

Penetrate v. t. (past & past part. penetrated; pres. part. penetrating)

To enter into; to make way into the interior of; to effect an entrance into; to pierce; as, light penetrates darkness.

To affect profoundly through the senses or feelings; to touch with feeling; to make sensible; to move deeply; as, to penetrate one's heart with pity. "The translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer's style."

To pierce into by the mind; to arrive at the inner contents or meaning of, as of a mysterious or difficult subject; to comprehend; to understand. "Things which here were too subtile for us to penetrate."

Penetrate v. i. To pass; to make way; to pierce. Also used figuratively. "Preparing to penetrate to the north and west." "Born where Heaven's influence scarce can penetrate." "The sweet of life that penetrates so near."

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Etymology of 'Penetrate'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Penetrate" Quotes from Famous Books

... bring in the use of the sea coal in these works instead of charcoal; the former being to be had at an easy rate, the latter not without a great expence; but hitherto they have proved ineffectual, the workmen finding by experience that a sea coal fire, how vehement soever, will not penetrate the most fixed parts of the ore, by which means they leave much of the ...

— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls

... Thus the Eastern woman, who is deeply aware in her heart of the sacredness of her mission, is a constant education to man. It has to be admitted that there are chances of such an influence failing to penetrate the callousness of the coarse-minded; but that is the destiny of all manifestations whose value is not in success or ...

— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... Jermagnan, whose loss we deeply lament; but on the back of the mountain—near 1,800 feet high, steep, rocky, deemed almost inaccessible, and which we had laboured much to make so—they found means once more to penetrate between our posts, which occupied an extent of above two miles, guarded by about 450 men; and in a very short space of time we saw that with great numbers they crowned all that side of the mountain which overlooks ...

— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... represented these as better accredited than those of the Jews. We see anew what treasures were stored up in Alexandria, and we feel all the more deeply their irrevocable loss. The desire and the hope of recovering the work of Celsus were therefore quite natural for any who wished to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual atmosphere of the second and third centuries, and especially for such as strove to understand clearly how men of this age, versed in philosophy, such as Clement and Origen himself, could confess Christianity, or become converted to it, or could defend ...

— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... spit into his jug of quass [a sour drink made from rye], which made him sick at his stomach. He afterward went to plow his summer-fallow, but I made the soil so hard that the plow could scarcely penetrate it. I thought the Fool would not succeed, but he started to work nevertheless. Moaning with pain, he still continued to labor. I broke one plow, but he replaced it with another, fixing it securely, and resumed work. Going beneath the surface ...

— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

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