Space Station), both granite and pumice are weightless, so the term "light" is really just our layperson's way of comparing the mass of different objects.Ĭompare a piece of granite with a piece of pumice: apart from being "light", the latter is porous.Ĭompare the Moon with a white dwarf star (both are about the same size, but the white dwarf has roughly the same mass as the Sun): the Moon is less massive. Note that density (mass per unit volume) is not the same as weight or heaviness: in an inertial environment (e.g.
Like compression, which can travel in waves (sound waves, for instance), rarefaction waves also exist in nature.A common rarefaction wave is the area of low relative pressure following a shock wave (see picture). Some different examples might be useful…Ĭompare the air at sea level with the air at the top of Everest: the latter, being less dense, is rarified.Ĭompare a party balloon filled with water and a party balloon filled with helium: water is denser than helium, so the helium balloon is light. In this page you can discover 8 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and related words for rarefy, like: thin, salubrious, attenuate, tighten, sublimate, subtilize, rarify and microcosmic. Rarefaction is the reduction of an items density, the opposite of compression. This might be making it harder to see what an appropriate antonym of "dense" might be. This question asks for a word "describing something that has a large volume, but not a lot of mass" - yet gives an example of two small dense objects (bowling balls) with relatively modest variation in weight. It quite possible that you will get a odd look or be misunderstood if you ask for a "rare bowling ball". Now the caveat to all this, is that the usage of word this way in now rare itself (pun intended). This is because typically when we think of "dense" we think of "heavy", but in the pure physical world this in not the case as weight is subjective, while (as you mentioned) mass and volume are not. So, rare does seem to be used for "objects of low(er) density" in the physics sense of the word. Visit to check opposite words for rarify in English. Rare: marked by wide separation of component particles thin (e.g. There are many synonyms of Rarify which include Absolve, Aerate, Aerify, Atone, Chasten, Clarify, Clean, Cleanse, Clear, Decontaminate, Deodorize, Depurate. The OED notes the word’s meaning as “pposed to dense,” and provides the following example (from around 1420), among others: The londis fatte, or lene, or thicke, or rare.Īlso, a check of current dictionary definitions gives us this one from Merriam-Webster: pyoor-f Filters Meanings Synonyms Sentences Category: Common Words Unique Words.
In fact, the earliest meaning of rare in English was precisely this one. Until the mid-19th century, the word was rare. Once upon a time, though, dense had an opposite. A historical word to mean the opposite of dense was rare, as stated in the following taken from an article in DON'T LOOK NOW What is a synonym and antonym for Expand 'expand the house by adding another wing' Antonyms: abridge, shrink, reduce, foreshorten, cut, abbreviate, shorten, contract.
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