synthetic

comparative more synthetic · superlative most synthetic

1. Of, or relating to synthesis.
2. chemistryProduced by synthesis instead of being isolated from a natural source (but may be identical to a product so obtained).

   1 more example

   As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.

   2013 August 10, “A new prescription”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848

3. medicineProduced by synthesis, thought to have the same effect as its natural counterpart, but chemically different from it.
4. Of a smell, taste, or other sensory quality: artificial; perceptible as an unnatural taste.
5. Artificial, not genuine.
6. grammarPertaining to the joining of bound morphemes in a word (compare analytic).
7. human sciencesOf a language, having a grammar principally dependent on the use of bound morphemes to indicate syntactic relationships.

plural synthetics

1. A synthetic compound.

   Only plastics and synthetics that cannot be recycled will end up in landfills, he said.

   2007 January 14, Elsa Brenner, “Art House to Get a Campus”, in New York Times