be careful, because impure motor oil can damage your car's engine
Victorian notions of what qualified as impure art now strike us as laughable.
Recent Examples on the WebFor Hartley, closing the sheds would kill the two birds of impure milk and alcohol with one stone.—Catherine Long, JSTOR Daily, 17 Jan. 2024 Given the urgency, the optimal solution now may necessitate impure and controversial measures.—Michael Sheldrick, New York Daily News, 5 Feb. 2024 But to a substantial extent, environmental quality is what economists call an impure public good.—James K. Boyce, Scientific American, 1 Nov. 2018 His fraternity brothers at Amherst College acknowledge his whiteness, but regard it as impure, murky.—Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker, 6 May 2024 But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.—Hal Brands, Foreign Affairs, 20 Feb. 2024 And in medieval and early modern Europe, when impure blood was believed to unbalance the humors of the body and cause disease, the creatures were seen as solicitous helpers, ever ready to relieve a patient of their unwelcome plasma.—Zoey Poll, New York Times, 16 Feb. 2024 Until about the mid-second century CE, Roman glass was manufactured with either Syro-Levantine raw glass made with relatively pure sand—resulting in a black/purplish color—or a high-magnesium glass made with impure iron-rich sand and the addition of vegetable ash to confer a dark green color.—Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica, 18 Sep. 2023 Using impure water in formula can prove fatal to infants.—Richard Engel, NBC News, 6 Dec. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'impure.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
Etymology
Middle English, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French, from Latin impurus, from in- + purus pure
Share