rarefied

comparative more rarefied · superlative most rarefied · alternative rarified

1. Less dense than usual; thin.

   The air at high altitudes at the top of mountains is rarefied.

2. Distant from the lives and everyday concerns of ordinary people; esoteric, exclusive, select.

   This is one of the most sought-after models in the rarefied world of high-performance sports car collecting.

   4 more examples

   The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below.

   1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXXIV, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book IV

   Of course, Beaumont was the real boss; but he lived in the rarefied atmosphere of some Olympian height from which he could distinguish nothing smaller than an international crisis or a split in the Cabinet.

   1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter II, in The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   I'm not taking the stand of any moralist. I have done the whole S&M route: the costumes and all, so I'm not talking from any rarified point — that's very important. That I have experienced it, that I have lived it.

   1977 April 30, David Holland, John Rechy, “The Politics of 'The Sexual Outlaw'”, in Gay Community News, page 9

   One day, she had to present the children, dressing them formally and introducing them by their full titles, ahead of high tea with extended family. It had been a crash course into the rarefied world in which some Norland charges live.

   2023 April 29, Lou Stoppard, “Inside the world of the elite nanny”, in FT Weekend, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC

3. Elevated in style or nature, sublime; of high intellectual or moral value.

alternative rarified

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of rarefy