ppl. a. [f. ATTENUATE v. + -ED.]

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  1.  Made thin or slender in girth or transverse thickness (by natural shaping, mechanical reduction, starving or wasting); tapered off; fine-drawn.

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1677.  Plot, Oxfordsh., 107. From the basis there issue … five tails of serpents, waved and attenuated.

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1742.  Young, Nt. Th., I. 179. The spider’s most attenuated thread.

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1840.  Hood, Up the Rhine (1869), 250. The venerable pastor thrust his attenuated fingers into the flame.

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1853.  Kane, Grinnell Exp., l. (1856), 484. Even by the friction of use, it [the kayack] becomes as attenuated as parchment.

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  2.  Made thin in consistency; rarefied, diluted.

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c. 1610.  Chapman, Hymme to Hermes, 58. Steele … did raise … the attenuated baies To that hot vapor.

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1635.  N. Carpenter, Geog. Del., II. ix. 148. The vapours are too much attenuated and rarified.

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1823.  Lamb, Elia, I. iii. Attenuated small beer.

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1874.  Moseley, Astron., lxix. 202. A huge ring of attenuated matter … girds the planet.

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1876.  M. Davies, Unorth. Lond., 74. That most attenuated of all things, the shadow of a shade.

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  fig.  1827.  Gent. Mag., XCVII. II. 494. A more attenuated and enlarged standard of thought.

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  3.  Weakened in intensity, force, effect, value.

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1828.  Carlyle, Misc. (1857), I. 217. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had taken place of the old insular home feeling.

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1882.  Manch. Guard., 22 Sept., 5. An ‘attenuated’ or modified bacteria.

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