rarefied means distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select. It carries an Arena rating of 1519, earned across 2 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, rarefied ranks #1,462 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #2,381 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #2,876 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #3,828 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books.
Why “rarefied” is a great word
Existing in an atmosphere elevated above the common or the quotidian, remote from everyday life and its mundane preoccupations. From the past participle of 'rarefy', itself from Latin rarus ("thin, sparse") + facere ("to make"), first recorded in English as an adjective in 1660–70. Unlike "esoteric" (which describes the deliberately obscure) or "sublime" (which suggests an awe-inspiring grandeur), "rarefied" implies a realm rendered almost insubstantial by its own lofty remove. It is the soundless, oxygen-thin air of a high academic seminar, the languid chill of a ballroom emptied of all but the impeccably pedigreed, and the distilled, crystalline logic of a philosophy that has severed its last tie to human feeling—the exquisite isolation of a world too refined for common breath.
adj
- Distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select.e.g.“Philosophical debates can be quite rarefied.”
- Elevated in style or nature, sublime; of high intellectual or moral value.
- Less dense than usual; thin.e.g.“The air at high altitudes at the top of mountains is rarefied.”
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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