dissipate
/ˈdɪsɪpeɪt
/verb
1(With reference to a feeling or emotion) disappear or cause to disappear: [no object]: the concern she’d felt for him had wholly dissipated [with object]: he wanted to dissipate his anger...
- So immediate emotion can dissipate before a country's population can make an important decision?
- Rage suddenly takes control as the other emotions dissipated when he'd been pulled from his meal.
- By contrast, on film it looked like the mere aggregation of takes and cutaways; its timbres and its fluency dissipated and finally disappeared.
Synonyms
disappear, vanish, evaporate, dissolve, melt away, melt into thin air, be dispelled, dematerialize;
disperse, scatter;
drive away, dispel, banish;
quell, allay, check
literary evanesce
1.1Disperse or scatter: the cloud of smoke dissipated...
- The clouds that had blocked the sun during the day had dissipated, scattered by the winds to reveal the stars sprawled in all their glory across the sky.
- She disappeared in a flash of smoke, dissipating like a shaken cloud.
- As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation.
2 [with object] Waste or fritter away (money, energy, or resources): he inherited, but then dissipated, his father’s fortune...
- This fueled regional battles over property and influence, greatly dissipating the energy and resources of the OC.
- Edwardes said: ‘The Ryder remedy only produced a bureaucratic paperchase dissipating management resource and effort.’
- An important truth is that we need full and active participation in liturgy and you don't get that by dissipating your resources.
Synonyms
squander, fritter (away), misspend, waste, throw away, make poor use of, be prodigal with;
spend recklessly/freely, lavish, expend, spend like water, throw around like confetti;
exhaust, drain, deplete, burn (up), use up, consume, run through, go through, lose
informal blow, splurge, pour/throw down the drain, spend money as if it grows on trees, spend money as if there were no tomorrow, spend money as if it were going out of style/fashion
British informal blue
vulgar slang piss away
2.1 Physics Cause (energy) to be lost through its conversion to heat: no power is dissipated in this sort of control element...
- This kinetic energy will be dissipated in the form of heat on impact of the clip with the magnet.
- There's a reduction in efficiency as energy is dissipated in heat.
- As the basal part of the stem was linearly elastic, there was no energy dissipated by viscous friction.
Derivatives
dissipative
/ adjective ...- This fact assumes a particular quality when considering ecosystems or their major compartments from the viewpoint of self-organized dissipative structures.
- This state may be associated with dissipative structures, i.e., structures resulting from a dissipation of energy rather than from conservative molecular forces.
- Surprisingly, the dissipative interactions decrease strongly after the first force peak occurring at a tip-sample distance of 25 nm.
dissipator
/ (also dissipater) noun ...- Indeed, the whole conflict is the greatest dissipator of energy across the region.
- You can see pictures of these dissipators on the 737 webpage below.
- Based on these results we have further strengthened the hypothesis that CP43’ functions as a nonradiative dissipator of light energy, thus protecting photosystem II from excessive excitation under iron-deficient conditions.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin dissipat- 'scattered', from the verb dissipare, from dis- 'apart, widely' + supare 'to throw'.