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Effete vs Vitiate - What's the difference?

effete | vitiate |

As an adjective effete

is (label) of substances, quantities etc: exhausted, spent, worn-out.

As a verb vitiate is

to spoil, make faulty; to reduce the value, quality, or effectiveness of something.

effete

English

Alternative forms

*

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • (label) Of substances, quantities etc: exhausted, spent, worn-out.
  • *, II.4.1.v:
  • Nature is not effœte , as he saith, or so lavish, to bestow all her gifts upon an age, but hath reserved some for posterity, to shew her power, that she is still the same, and not old or consumed.
  • Of people: lacking strength or vitality; feeble, powerless, impotent.
  • *
  • Amid the effete monarchies and princedoms of feudal Europe, morally and materially exhausted by the Thirty Years' War, the only hope of resistance to France lay in the little Republic of merchants, Holland.
  • Decadent, weak through self-indulgence.
  • Effeminate.
  • *
  • a good-humored, effete boy brought up by maiden aunts.

    Derived terms

    * effetely * effeteness

    vitiate

    English

    Verb

    (vitiat)
  • to spoil, make faulty; to reduce the value, quality, or effectiveness of something
  • *1851 ,
  • There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated , I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.
  • * 1997': ‘Mr Rose,’ says the Physician, ‘this man was brought to us from Russia. Precisely such a case of '''vitiated judgment as I describe at length in my Treatise on Madness. Mayhap you have read it?’ — Andrew Miller, ''Ingenious Pain
  • to debase or morally corrupt
  • *1890 , Leo Tolstoy,
  • *:The robber does not intentionally vitiate people, but the governments, to accomplish their ends, vitiate whole generations from childhood to manhood with false religions and patriotic instruction.
  • (archaic) to violate, to rape
  • * 1965': ‘Crush the cockatrice,’ he groaned, from his death-cell. ‘I am dead in law’ – but of the girl he denied that he had ‘attempted to '''vitiate her at Nine years old’; for ‘upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done’. — John Fowles, ''The Magus
  • to make something ineffective, to invalidate
  • *{{quote-book
  • , author = , title = , year = 1734 , page = 78 , passage = ...all the hinges of the animal frame are subverted, every animal function is vitiated ; the carcass retains but just life enough to make it capable of suffering. }}