Isolate Meaning
/ˈaɪ.sə.leɪt/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
verbTo set apart or cut off from others.
verbTo place in quarantine or isolation.
Sentence Examples
In order to isolate him from bacteria, and such, he is not allowed visitors.
Maybe you can help us isolate the problem.
Synonyms & Antonyms
Synonyms:
Antonyms:
None
CEFR Practice Quiz
To contain the outbreak, the nurse must ____ every person showing symptoms.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Doctors had to ____ the patient to prevent the spread of the highly contagious disease to other people.
Word Origin & History
Back-formation from isolated, from French isolé, from Italian isolato, from Latin īnsulatus (whence also insulate), see -ate (etymology 1, 2 and 3).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"By isolating these two main types of relation, hyponymy and incompatibility, we can characterize the relations between a large web of items."
— 1977, Ruth Kempson, Semantic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 86:
"Iran could not be happier. The more Israel sinks into the West Bank, the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses on Israel’s colonialism rather than Iran’s nuclear enrichment, the more people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine."
— 2014 May 4, Thomas L. Friedman, “Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 31 Mar 2020:
"To isolate the petroline the condensed oil is distilled again until fifty per cent. of oil has been obtained, and what is left in the still is petroline."
— 1871, English Patents of Inventions, Specifications: 1871, 901 - 946, page 6:
"One of the hidden glories of Victorian engineering is proper drains. Isolating a city’s effluent and shipping it away in underground sewers has probably saved more lives than any medical procedure except vaccination."
— 2014 June 14, “It's a gas”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8891, archived from the original on 09 Jan 2025:
"We used electropherotypes in order to differentiate the original parental strains or isolates from the finally tumor cell-adapted isolates."
— 2016 February 2, “Experimental Adaptation of Rotaviruses to Tumor Cell Lines”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI:
Explore More C1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
To contain the outbreak, the nurse must ____ every person showing symptoms.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Doctors had to ____ the patient to prevent the spread of the highly contagious disease to other people.