Refine excessively, as with subtle distinctions or needless delicacy: the sole French character is frivolous and overrefined
More example sentences
- The writer sometimes tended to over-elaborate and over-refine his subject's language in later versions and revisions.
- After years of polluting, processing and over-refining our food, we are suffering from adverse health problems and, worse still, we are inflicting them on our children.
- Over-refining foods involves the addition of unhealthy ingredients.
- Example sentences
- Shyness, over-refinement, physical fear and revulsion: this, he seems to understand, is the repertoire of an all-round loser, denying him the compensatory feeling of heroic virtue or a conviction that he is fighting to save his soul.
- In the vigorous and philosophical introduction to his book, he remarked severely: ‘a certain over-refinement of the art of cookery is tending to appear among civilised people.’
- Could they have been warnings against over-indulgence and over-refinement that might weaken Manchu culture?
For editors and proofreaders
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