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say it: sin-THET-ik
synthetic is an adjective and noun meaning "not of natural origin; prepared or made artificially". It carries 7 recorded senses.
not of natural origin; prepared or made artificially
“man-made fibers”
“synthetic leather”
chemistry
involving or of the nature of synthesis (combining separate elements to form a coherent whole) as opposed to analysis
“limnology is essentially a synthetic science composed of elements...that extend well beyond the limits of biology”
systematic combining of root and modifying elements into single words
linguistics
of a proposition whose truth value is determined by observation or facts
“`all men are arrogant' is a synthetic proposition”
logic
artificial as if portrayed in a film
“a novel with flat celluloid characters”
not genuine or natural
“counterfeit rhetoric that flourishes when passions are synthetic”
a compound made artificially by chemical reactions
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for synthetic come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.