aˈttenuated, ppl. a.
[f. attenuate v. + -ed.]
1. Made thin or slender in girth or transverse thickness (by natural shaping, mechanical reduction, starving, or wasting); tapered off; fine-drawn.
| 1677 Plot Oxfordsh. 107 From the basis there issue..five tails of serpents, waved and attenuated. 1742 Young Nt. Th. i. 179 The spider's most attenuated thread. 1840 Hood Up Rhine (1869) 250 The venerable pastor thrust his attenuated fingers into the flame. 1853 Kane Grinnell Exp. I. (1856) 484 As attenuated as parchment. |
2. Made thin in consistency; rarefied, diluted.
| c 1610 Chapman Hymne to Hermes 58 Steele..did raise..the attenuated baies To that hot vapor. 1635 N. Carpenter Geog. Del. ii. ix. 148 The vapours are too much attenuated and rarified. 1823 Lamb Elia i. iii, Attenuated small beer. 1874 Moseley Astron. lxix. 202 A huge ring of attenuated matter..girds the planet. 1876 C. M. Davies Unorth. Lond. 74 That most attenuated of all things, the shadow of a shade. |
| fig. 1827 Gent. Mag. XCVII. ii. 494 A more attenuated and enlarged standard of thought. |
3. Weakened in intensity, force, effect, value.
| 1828 Carlyle Misc. (1857) I. 217 A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had taken place of the old insular home feeling. 1882 Manch. Guard. 22 Sept. 5 An ‘attenuated’ or modified bacteria. |