Definition of Refine

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Refine

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.

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.

To become pure; to be cleared of feculent matter.

To improve in accuracy, delicacy, or excellence.

To affect nicety or subtilty in thought or language.

Related Definitions:

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Refine Quotations

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot

I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don't quite know how to explain it but it's there. These can't be the only notes in the world, there's got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.
Marvin Gaye

The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.
Washington Irving

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.
Pete Townshend

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Thomas B. Macaulay

All of the material for The Fine Line was created via improvisation with my partner, but not in front of an audience. We'd continue to refine it in front of an audience based on their responses until it was set and scripted.
Douglas Wood

Sure, science involves trial and error. Scientists refine theories each day. But as they do, they help us grasp more clearly the wonders of the world and the universe.
Tony Snow

As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.
James Ellroy

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.
Jerry Harrison

Democracy makes us articulate our views, defend them, and refine them.
Lee H. Hamilton

Refine Translations

refine in Dutch is louteren, raffineren, verfijnen
refine in German is verfeinern, verfeinern, raffiniere
refine in Latin is excolo
refine in Spanish is refinar

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