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prettygoodwordcohobate - v., to redistill a substance.
Originally, in alchemy and pre-modern chemistry, to distill one or more additional times by pouring the distillate back into the vessel without cleaning out the dregs left behind -- apparently to get more virtue out of said dregs, but I'm a little unclear on this point. Pronounced COH-hoh-bayt, arrived in English around 1640 from Modern Latin cohobātus, the past participle of cohobāre, originally meaning to give a darker color to, after which the trail gets obscure -- it's Paracelsian jargon ultimately taken from Arabic, but whether from qohba, brownish color, or kaʿab, second, dictionaries disagree.
---L.
Originally, in alchemy and pre-modern chemistry, to distill one or more additional times by pouring the distillate back into the vessel without cleaning out the dregs left behind -- apparently to get more virtue out of said dregs, but I'm a little unclear on this point. Pronounced COH-hoh-bayt, arrived in English around 1640 from Modern Latin cohobātus, the past participle of cohobāre, originally meaning to give a darker color to, after which the trail gets obscure -- it's Paracelsian jargon ultimately taken from Arabic, but whether from qohba, brownish color, or kaʿab, second, dictionaries disagree.
---L.
