synthetic
/sɪnˈθɛtɪk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.95 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Produced by synthesis instead of being isolated from a natural source (but may be identical to a product so obtained).
adj
Produced by synthesis, thought to have the same effect as its natural counterpart, but chemically different from it.
adj
Of a smell, taste, or other sensory quality: artificial; perceptible as an unnatural taste.
adj
Artificial, not genuine.
adj
Pertaining to the joining of bound morphemes in a word (compare analytic).
adj
Of a language, having a grammar principally dependent on the use of bound morphemes to indicate syntactic relationships.
noun
A synthetic compound.
Example Sentences
- "As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one."
- "Only plastics and synthetics that cannot be recycled will end up in landfills, he said."
Etymology
From French synthétique, from Ancient Greek συνθετικός (sunthetikós); Equivalent to synthesis + -ic (suffix formation of -tic).
Origin
- Source language: French