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Refine   /rəfˈaɪn/  /rɪfˈaɪn/   Listen
verb
Refine  v. t.  (past & past part. refined; pres. part. refining)  
1.
To reduce to a fine, unmixed, or pure state; to free from impurities; to free from dross or alloy; to separate from extraneous matter; to purify; to defecate; as, to refine gold or silver; to refine iron; to refine wine or sugar. "I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined."
2.
To purify from what is gross, coarse, vulgar, inelegant, low, and the like; to make elegant or exellent; to polish; as, to refine the manners, the language, the style, the taste, the intellect, or the moral feelings. "Love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges."
Synonyms: To purify; clarify; polish; ennoble.



Refine  v. i.  
1.
To become pure; to be cleared of feculent matter. "So the pure, limpid stream, when foul with stains, Works itself clear, and, as it runs, refines."
2.
To improve in accuracy, delicacy, or excellence. "Chaucer refined on Boccace, and mended his stories." "But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! How the style refines!"
3.
To affect nicety or subtilty in thought or language. "He makes another paragraph about our refining in controversy."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Refine" Quotes from Famous Books



... might be schools of design for improvement in ornamental manufacture, the development of architecture, and whatever aids to refine and give beauty to social life, including a simple academic system for the elementary branches of drawing and coloring, upon a scientific basis of accumulated knowledge and experience, providing models and other advantages not readily accessible to private resources, but leaving individual ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... to be thought of as a separate endowment,—that is to say, if the individual himself be a man of station, and has had gentlemen for his father and grandfather. The sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the third generation. The tradesmen, too, and all other classes, have their own proprieties. The only value of my criticisms, therefore, lay in their exemplifying the proneness of a traveller to measure one people by the distinctive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... not the principles that should regulate clothing, the rules of cleanliness, the advantages of early rising and domestic exercise, as readily communicated as the principles of mineralogy, or rules of syntax? Are not the rules of Jesus Christ, applied to refine domestic manners and preserve a good temper, as important as the abstract principles of ethics, as taught by Paley, Wayland, or Jouffroy? May not the advantages of neatness, system, and order, be as well illustrated in showing how they contribute ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... confession of her own intractable character, without religious faith to ennoble it, without even imagination to refine it—the unconscious disclosure of the one tender and loving instinct in her nature still piteously struggling for existence, with no sympathy to sustain it, with no light to guide it—would have touched the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... helping out with his own good-faith the inadequacy of their appeal. Music alone hitherto had really helped HIM, and taken him out of himself. To music, instinctively, more and more he was dedicate; and in his desire to refine and organise the court music, from which, by leave of absence to official performers enjoying their salaries at a distance, many parts had literally fallen away, like the favourite notes of a worn-out spinet, he was ably seconded by a devoted youth, the deputy ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater


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