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Attenuation   Listen
noun
Attenuation  n.  
1.
The act or process of making slender, or the state of being slender; emaciation.
2.
The act of attenuating; the act of making thin or less dense, or of rarefying, as fluids or gases.
3.
The process of weakening in intensity; diminution of virulence; as, the attenuation of virus.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Attenuation" Quotes from Famous Books



... and this medicine of Mind is not [1] necessarily infinitesimal but infinite. Herein the mental medicine of divine metaphysics and the medical systems of allopathy and homoeopathy differ. Mental medi- cine gains no potency by attenuation, and its largest [5] dose is never dangerous, but the more ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... no longer be concealed. My mother was ill, and that seriously. She still attended to her daily occupations, but she was greatly changed; she seemed during the past few weeks to have grown thin almost to attenuation. She was very pale, except at times there was a feverish glow upon her cheeks. I was then too young to detect, as I should now do, the insidious approach of that foe to human life, consumption. Going one day to visit my mother, I was so struck by the change so visible in her countenance, ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... actually supporting the former, who leaned heavily upon his arm, as it appeared from her manner of carriage, so weakly and wearily she stood. Her form was extremely slight, and the outline of her countenance sharp from attenuation, and in that uncertain light, or rather shade, she looked almost as pale as the carved faces before us. The gentleman, who was of a stately height, bent over her with an anxious air, while she gazed fixedly upon the monument. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... on the side of liberty. Thus the extent of the evil will become reduced of itself, and instead of advancing, as during some years past, towards a colossal development of servitude, it will proceed in the direction of its gradual attenuation. ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... from Nanda with an accent of attenuation at once so precipitate and so vague that it only made her attitude at first rather awkward. "Oh!" she immediately repeated, but with an increase of the same effect. After which, conscious, she made, as if ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... men generally had been brought down to attenuation by the scarcity of their food; while their khaki uniforms were not uniform in the least, the men for the most part looking, as Bob Dickenson put it, "like scarecrows ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive; rather because they are more limited, more stereotyped, more dead. They symbolise something precise and unmistakable; but this precision is itself attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value of the counter is better understood when it is a word than when it is a chord, because all that a word conveys has already become a thought, while all that musical sounds convey remains within the region of emotion which has not been ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... and perhaps an excess of maternal care, remedied the defect, and it lost flesh and certain unemployed parts of its limbs very rapidly. It was further reduced in bulk by falling under the wagon and having the whole train pass over it, but singularly enough its greatest attenuation was in the head and shoulders—the complexion peeling off as a solid layer, followed by the disappearance of distinct strata of its extraordinary composition. This continued until the head and shoulders were much too small for even ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... will stay with thee," answered Raymond, who was greatly attracted by John's pale and thoughtful face, and could not but pity him for his manifest lack of strength and muscle. The youth was tall and rode well, but he was slight to the verge of attenuation, and the hollow cheek and unnaturally bright eyes sunk in deep caverns told a tale that was not hard to read. Young De Brocas might make a student, a clerk, a man of letters, but he would never be a soldier; and that in ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... together, that many were believed to have died from mere deficiency of air. There was no doubt that many others, debtors, had come to a miserable end by starvation. Some were found in the last stage of attenuation. Those who could not provide for themselves, had nothing to feed on but a scanty charity-allowance from the benevolence of individuals, which, when distributed among the whole, furnished each with sometimes only a few peas in the day; and at intervals of several days, an ounce and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various

... between the rollers in pairs, the emerging product being less in diameter than the diameter of a single slubbing. The machine combines the fourfold process of combination, attenuation, twisting and winding. There are more spindles upon this ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous

... this cynical announcement: he searched his visitor's face for some attenuation of the words. But Nick apparently struck him as unashamed, and a faint colour coming into his withered cheek indicated his mystification and alarm. "Have you been unfaithful to her?" ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... a term not unaptly applied to fermentation, the property of attenuation being to divide, then dilute, and rarify thick, gross, viscid, and dense substances, in which some degree of fluidity is pre-supposed; it is, therefore, that kind of dilution or fluidity which is promoted by agitation, and very aptly applied to mark the progress ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger

... Bobby's eyes as he followed Trimmer's sprawling figure, so much like a bloated spider's in its bigness of circumference and its attenuation of limbs, that suddenly he shuddered and turned away as when one finds oneself about to step upon ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester

... observations upon the sick lead me within the last few years to prefer giving only two shakes to medicinal liquids, whereas I formerly used to give ten." The process of dilution is carried on in the same way as the attenuation of the powder was done; each successive dilution with alcohol reducing the medicine to a hundredth part of the quantity of that which preceded it. In this way the dilution of the original millionth of a grain ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... earth. The New Astronomy, like the old, begins with a nebular hypothesis. It imagines the matter now composing the solar group to have been originally dispersed through the space occupied by our system, and to have been in a state of attenuation under the influence of high heat. Out of this condition of diffusion the solar system has been evolved. The idea is a creation by the process of evolution; it is evolution applied to the planets. More particularly, the hypothesis ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... heard me, sir; you haven't heard all. You don't know what I have to say in attenuation of ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... "Tell them I never loved 'em so much as now," and burst into tears! No wonder that he wrote in his paper that I was "a woman of extreme nervous sensibility." Another of them said that "my figure was spare almost to attenuation." America soon remedied that. I began to put on flesh before I had been in the country a week, and it was during my fifth American tour that I became really fat for the first ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... great social organizations whose chief educational function consists in putting a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit him, in the most iron-bound fashion, into existing forms. It is the attenuation, pulverization and assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education. Its processes, in fact, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner



Words linked to "Attenuation" :   weakening, attenuate, weakness, fading



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