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Showing results for sublimate. Search instead for sublates.
Definitions

sublimate

[suhb-luh-mayt, suhb-luh-mit, -mayt] / ˈsʌb ləˌmeɪt, ˈsʌb lə mɪt, -ˌmeɪt /
VERB
purify
Synonyms
Antonyms


VERB
divert
Synonyms


Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

It almost feels like some kind of test, where you are forced to sublimate your wishes and, perhaps, your self respect.

From MarketWatch ● Feb. 5, 2026

We have to sublimate a lot of emotions into our sports teams because we’re repressed.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 24, 2024

This refusenik sensibility is threaded through the entire series, and any attempt by the characters to sublimate themselves to social norms fizzled quickly and often in grand fashion.

From New York Times ● May 12, 2023

Halloween may be over, but if you ask me carving a gourd still seems like a good way to sublimate creeping dread.

From Slate ● Nov. 4, 2022

Put it with the corrosive sublimate into a white or queensware vessel having a close cover, and holding a pint, to allow for swelling.

From The Ladies' Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners or, Miss Leslie's Behaviour Book by Eliza Leslie

He sublimates by focusing on new fabrication methods and by researching casting and molding techniques.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 27, 2026

"Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground," NASA's website states.

From Salon ● May 16, 2025

It’s as if the cold, otherworldly solitude of Yanji sublimates the characters’ unrequited desires into a deeper yearning for connection.

From New York Times ● Jan. 18, 2024

Hoss, whose quiet, sympathetic gaze can register even the subtlest shifts in emotional temperature, here sublimates her star persona in much the same way that Sharon represses her own needs.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2022

In the flame of reduction, and upon charcoal, it is reduced with intumescence to metallic lead, which is volatilized by a continued blast, and sublimates on charcoal, as mentioned above.

From A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe Being A Graduated Course Of Analysis For The Use Of Students And All Those Engaged In The Examination Of Metallic Combinations by Anonymous

Like Kafka, Schulz sublimated the horrors that surrounded him into vivid allegories of the fantastic and the extraordinary.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026

It’s a good-looking movie about sublimated lives and the need to break free, one that feels torn between presenting the surface allure of those desires in a repressive time and exploring anything deeper.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 25, 2025

The 12-foot-long cabinetlike work is the latest in the series that Peters calls “impossible monuments”: installations made out of disparate, significant materials that explore overlooked or sublimated matters of import.

From Seattle Times ● Jun. 20, 2024

Materials are sublimated in a vacuum under heat supply, i.e. they are converted from a solid to a gaseous state and condense on the substrate surface.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 14, 2024

This woman who was so down to earth and practical in all other aspects of life sublimated her childhood passion and lived it tragically.

From "The House of the Spirits: A Novel" by Isabel Allende

In earlier work, she showed that sublimating CO2 ice can trigger debris flows that cut deep channels along crater walls.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 16, 2025

Yet they have enough in common that one might think they could be friends: Each is frustrated with life, work, their domestic arrangements, their parents; depressed; and sublimating their anger except as regards the other.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 10, 2023

But previous work has shown that sublimating water ice alone couldn’t provide enough push to explain ’Oumuamua’s anomalous acceleration, so the authors of the new paper add an additional step.

From Scientific American ● Mar. 22, 2023

They are way too bound up in the past, with Gretchen likely sublimating her attraction to Luke, and Aaron suppressing his once-budding relationship with Ellie.

From Salon ● May 19, 2021

Actually, by now it's full of slowly sublimating ice.

From "The Martian" by Andy Weir




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