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verb

refine

improve or perfect by pruning or polishing

In a sentence

Six example sentences with refine, each labelled with its topic.

  • Each demo day the team refines the pitch, cutting one slide and rewriting the opening line again.

    Startups

  • She refined the recipe over a winter, dropping the cream entirely and letting the roasted garlic carry it.

    Cooking

  • Refining a print takes hours of small dodges and burns that nobody notices unless you show the first attempt.

    Photography

  • She spent the summer refining her jump shot, lowering the release point until the ball left her hand a beat sooner.

    Basketball

  • The poet refined the stanza for a month, cutting adjectives until only nine words remained on the page.

    Literature

  • Socrates refines each definition by testing it against examples, dropping any phrase that lets a counterexample through.

    Philosophy

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Found in these word lists

Found in 4 published word lists

Each source is a published word list that contains refine. No exam board publishes an official GRE, GMAT or SAT list; GMAT words come from GRE lists and the Academic Word List.