rarefied

• rarified

rarefied (comparative more rarefied, superlative most rarefied)

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

   Philosophical debates can be quite rarefied.

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

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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.

   • 2023 April 29, Lou Stoppard, “Inside the world of the elite nanny”, in FT Weekend:

     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.

2. Elevated in style or nature, sublime; of high intellectual or moral value.
3. (of a gas etc.) Less dense than usual; thin.

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

rarefied

1. simple past and past participle of rarefy