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If you macerate something, you leave it in liquid until it goes soft — or it sits there and goes soft by itself. Cooks macerate fruit in sugar, wine, or spirits: the fruit gives out juice, gets tender, and the liquid takes the flavour. In a lab or a hospital, people may macerate plant or animal tissue in water or chemicals so it breaks down and is easier to study. It is a slightly technical word. At home most people just say soak. Though actually, soak is wider: you soak a shirt to get a stain out, but you would not macerate a shirt. Macerate is for when the thing is meant to or come apart on purpose. There is a rare noun macerate for the soaked stuff, but almost only meet the verb.
浸軟、浸泡使軟化（烹飪裡也說浸漬）
組成Borrowed in 1534 from Latin mācerātus, from the verb mācerō, “to soften in liquid.” English -ate is the usual verb ending taken from that Latin form. Further back it sits on an old root *mag- / *mak- “to knead,” the same deep root as make — though you cannot hear that in the modern words. French macérer is a sister word, not an English one.
同家族的字
- macerationthe noun: the soaking, or the soft result
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
macerateverb/ˈmæs.ə.ɹeɪt/
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To soften (something) or separate it into pieces by (or as if by) soaking it in a heated or unheated liquid.
- 2
To reduce solids to small pieces (in a macerator).
- Near-synonyms: comminute, crush, pulverize
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archaicTo make lean; to cause to waste away.
- Baal scuttles with ten tails Between as many legs as he could carry— Perhaps Thomas poking through the holes And finding resolution beyond the scales And incorporeal pain of the hammered Messiah,
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obsoleteTo subdue the appetite by poor or scanty diet; to mortify.
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obsoleteTo mortify the flesh in general.
- “My dear child, how are you employed?” I knew the voice of the Superior, and I replied, “My father, I was sleeping.” “And I was macerating myself at the foot of the altar for you, my child,—the scourge is red with my blood.” I returned no answer, for I felt the maceration was better merited by the betrayer than the betrayed.
maceratenoun/ˈmæs.ə.ɹɪt/
- 1
A macerated substance.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。