- 1合成的、人造的；（用在感情、態度上）裝出來的、不真誠的。台灣講衣物材質時多說「化學纖維／化纖」「人造皮」，不必逐字譯成「合成的」。
Made by human beings through a chemical process, instead of coming from a plant, an animal, or the ground. Synthetic materials — nylon, , , synthetic rubber, synthetic leather — are the ordinary use, and it can be a plain, neutral description: synthetic fibres dry faster, synthetic oil protects an engine better, and a synthetic drug can be identical to the natural one and far cheaper to make. But the word carries a second life as a criticism, and this is where students get caught. Applied to something that is not a material at all — a smile, a feeling, an apology, the atmosphere at an event — 'synthetic' means fake, manufactured, not genuinely felt. 'His sympathy was completely synthetic.' Even with materials, the word can pick up a faint of 'not the real thing', which is why sellers say 'vegan leather' or 'technical fabric' rather than 'synthetic'. It is also a noun: 'synthetics' means the man-made cloths as a group. One more use, quite separate, in language study: a synthetic language is one that packs a lot of grammar into word endings, like Latin — no judgement involved there at all, just a technical term.
From the word’s history
From French synthétique, from Ancient Greek συνθετικός; synthesis + -ic.
借自法文 synthétique，源自希臘文 συνθετικός。
組成synthesis ('putting things together to make a whole') + -ic (an ending that makes an adjective). It reached English through French synthétique, from Greek synthetikos, from syn- 'together' + tithenai 'to place'. So the idea inside the word is 'put together' — which explains both the chemistry and the fake smile.
同家族的字
- synthesisthe noun this adjective is built on — combining parts into a whole
- synthesizerthe instrument that builds sound by putting parts together — same root
- photosynthesisshares the Greek root — 'putting together with light'
- sympathyshares syn- 'together', in its sym- form before p
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，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。
syntheticadj/sɪnˈθɛtɪk/
- 1
Of, or relating to synthesis.
- 2
chemistrynatural-sciencesphysical-sciencesProduced by synthesis instead of being isolated from a natural source (but may be identical to a product so obtained).
- As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.
- 3
medicinesciencesProduced by synthesis, thought to have the same effect as its natural counterpart, but chemically different from it.
- 4
Artificial, not genuine.
- 5
grammarhuman-scienceslinguisticsPertaining to the joining of bound morphemes in a word (compare analytic).
- 6
human-scienceslinguisticssciencesOf a language, having a grammar principally dependent on the use of bound morphemes to indicate syntactic relationships.
syntheticnoun/sɪnˈθɛtɪk/
- 1
A synthetic compound.
- Only plastics and synthetics that cannot be recycled will end up in landfills, he said.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。