attenuated

attenuated

1. simple past and past participle of attenuate

attenuated (comparative more attenuated, superlative most attenuated)

1. Made, or become weak; subject to attenuation.

   Antonyms: unattenuated; see also Thesaurus:total

   attenuated power

   • 1823, Elia [pseudonym; Charles Lamb], “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago”, in Elia. Essays which have Appeared under that Signature in The London Magazine, London: […] [Thomas Davison] for Taylor and Hessey, […], →OCLC, page 28:

     He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf—our crug—moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from.

   • 1835, William Gilmore Simms, The Partisan, Harper, Chapter XI, page 140:

     She had become spiritualized in mind, even as she had grown attenuated in person.

   • 2025, Sonia Sotomayor (writing for a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States), Opinion of the Court in Republic of Hungary et al. v. Simon et al., № 23—867, 2025-02-21

     To conclude otherwise requires accepting an attenuated fiction that commingling funds in an account, even if done decades earlier, means the account today still contains funds attributable to the sale of expropriated property.

   1. (biology, medicine, of pathogens) Weakened, usually in a way that includes nonreplicating status.

      Antonym: unattenuated

      Coordinate terms: nonlive, killed

      Near-synonym: nonreplicating (often synonymous)

      the live attenuated type of vaccines

2. (botany) Long and tapering (especially of leaves)