This week we continue our vocabulary-building series, “The Closing Word.” Each week we provide a new word to help build your vocabulary and show you an example of how to use it.
This week’s closing word:
Pronounced: (uh-TEN-you-ate; uh-TEN-you-uht)
Verb:
1. become weaker, in strength, value, or magnitude
2. weaken the consistency of (a chemical substance)
Adjective:
reduced in strength
From Vocabulary.com: “The versatile word attenuate denotes a weakening in amount, intensity, or value. As a verb, attenuate is usually transitive, meaning it needs an object to be complete, such as in the sentence: “This tanning process tends to attenuate the deer hide, making it softer.” The word can be intransitive in past tense, as in “The rain attenuated, ending the storm.” And it can even be used as an adjective to describe something weakened: “Even an attenuated solution will remove the stain.”
Example:
“Condo prices will attenuate when the tech bubble begins to deflate and a large number of luxury projects come online.”
