SOPHISTICATE

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IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does sophisticate mean? 

• SOPHISTICATE (noun)
  The noun SOPHISTICATE has 1 sense:

1. a worldly-wise person

  Familiarity information: SOPHISTICATE used as a noun is very rare.

• SOPHISTICATE (verb)
  The verb SOPHISTICATE has 4 senses:

1. make less natural or innocent

2. practice sophistry; change the meaning of or be vague about in order to mislead or deceive

3. alter and make impure, as with the intention to deceive

4. make more complex or refined

  Familiarity information: SOPHISTICATE used as a verb is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• SOPHISTICATE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A worldly-wise person

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

man of the world; sophisticate

Hypernyms ("sophisticate" is a kind of...):

adult; grownup (a fully developed person from maturity onward)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "sophisticate"):

cosmopolitan; cosmopolite (a sophisticated person who has travelled in many countries)

slicker (a person with good manners and stylish clothing)

Derivation:

sophisticate (make less natural or innocent)

• SOPHISTICATE (verb)

Present simple: I / you / we / they sophisticate    ... he / she / it sophisticates   
Past simple: sophisticated   
Past participle: sophisticated   
-ing form: sophisticating   

Sense 1

Meaning:

Make less natural or innocent

Classified under:

Verbs of political and social activities and events

Context example:

Their manners had sophisticated the young girls

Hypernyms (to "sophisticate" is one way to...):

civilise; civilize; cultivate; educate; school; train (teach or refine to be discriminative in taste or judgment)

Sentence frame:

Something ----s somebody

Derivation:

sophisticate (a worldly-wise person)

sophistication (the quality or character of being intellectually sophisticated and worldly through cultivation or experience or disillusionment)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Practice sophistry; change the meaning of or be vague about in order to mislead or deceive

Classified under:

Verbs of telling, asking, ordering, singing

Synonyms:

convolute; pervert; sophisticate; twist; twist around

Context example:

Don't twist my words

Hypernyms (to "sophisticate" is one way to...):

denote; refer (have as a meaning)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s something
Something ----s something

Derivation:

sophistication (falsification by the use of sophistry; misleading by means of specious fallacies)

sophistication (a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Alter and make impure, as with the intention to deceive

Classified under:

Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.

Synonyms:

doctor; doctor up; sophisticate

Context example:

Sophisticate rose water with geraniol

Hypernyms (to "sophisticate" is one way to...):

adulterate; debase; dilute; load; stretch (corrupt, debase, or make impure by adding a foreign or inferior substance; often by replacing valuable ingredients with inferior ones)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s something

Sense 4

Meaning:

Make more complex or refined

Classified under:

Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.

Context example:

a sophisticated design

Hypernyms (to "sophisticate" is one way to...):

complicate; elaborate; rarify; refine (make more complex, intricate, or richer)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s something
Something ----s something

Derivation:

sophistication (being expert or having knowledge of some technical subject)

 Context examples 

The sophisticated piano-sized spacecraft, which launched in January 2006, reached Neptune's orbit — nearly 4.4. billion kilometers from Earth — in a record eight years and eight months.

(NASA Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Crosses Neptune's Orbit, NASA)

The new value is derived from Mars’ gravity field, a global model that can be extracted from satellite tracking data using sophisticated mathematical tools.

(New Gravity Map Suggests Mars Has a Porous Crust, NASA)

Making sense of these remote observations requires the development of sophisticated models for planetary climate and evolution to allow scientists to recognize which of these distant planets that might host life.

(Some Exoplanets May Have Greater Variety of Life than Exists on Earth, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

"With sophisticated computer models, we can understand what happens with every single water molecule in a very, very small droplet."

(Scientists probe the limits of ice, National Science Foundation)

It means you will be working on sophisticated projects that you will enjoy, and best of all, you will likely be paid well, too.

(AstrologyZone.com, by Susan Miller)

Far from operating as a reflex, color perception involves a set of sophisticated brain operations that ultimately assign value and meaning to what we see.

(Rosy health and sickly green: color associations play robust role in reading faces, National Institutes of Health)

The simulations resulting from a sophisticated model the researchers used show that solar tsunamis could be the connection that explains the Sun's remarkably rapid transition from one cycle to the next.

('Terminators' on the sun trigger plasma tsunamis, start of new solar cycles, National Science Foundation)

Epidemiological methods involve sophisticated statistics and higher mathematics.

(Epidemiological Method, NCI Thesaurus)

Researchers have used sophisticated models to estimate the mass of the Milky Way to be 890 billion times that of our sun.

(Researchers Estimate Mass of Milky Way to Be 3.9 Tredecillion Pounds, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Visualizing a virus, or other structures that exist on a nanoscale level, typically requires expensive, sophisticated microscopes.

(Smartphone microscope detects nanoparticles and viruses, NIH)