Confine vs Refine - What's the difference?
confine | refine |
To restrict; to keep within bounds; to shut or keep in a limited space or area.
* Shakespeare
* Dryden
To have a common boundary; to border; to lie contiguous; to touch; followed by on'' or ''with .
* Milton
* Dryden
To reduce to a fine, unmixed, or pure state; to free from impurities; to free from dross or alloy; to separate from extraneous matter; to purify
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= To purify from what is gross, coarse, vulgar, inelegant, low, and the like; to make elegant or excellent; to polish.
To become pure; to be cleared of feculent matter.
To improve in accuracy, delicacy, or excellence.
To affect nicety or subtlety in thought or language.
As verbs the difference between confine and refine
is that confine is to restrict; to keep within bounds; to shut or keep in a limited space or area while refine is to reduce to a fine, unmixed, or pure state; to free from impurities; to free from dross or alloy; to separate from extraneous matter; to purify.As a noun confine
is limit.confine
English
Verb
(confin)- Now let not nature's hand / Keep the wild flood confined ! let order die!
- He is to confine himself to the compass of numbers and the slavery of rhyme.
- Where your gloomy bounds / Confine with heaven
- Betwixt heaven and earth and skies there stands a place / Confining on all three.
Synonyms
* (limit) border, bound, limit English heteronyms ----refine
English
Verb
(refin)Yesterday’s fuel, passage=The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil strike in Pennsylvania.