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sophisticated

adjectiveverbcommon in dialogue

Of a person: having obtained worldly experience, and lacking naiveté; cosmopolitan, worldly-wise.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of a person: having obtained worldly experience, and lacking naiveté; cosmopolitan, worldly-wise.

    Set against the background of the American civil war, with Keaton a cunning but unskilled driver, unaided, of the ponderous giant of a locomotive, it remains not only probably the funniest film about railways ever made, but one of the funniest silent films to retain its comic power over today's more sophisticated audiences.

  2. 2

    Of art or other things: appealing to the tastes of an intellectual or sophisticated (sense 1) person; cerebral; also, cultured, elegant, refined.

  3. 3

    Complicated, especially of complex technology.

    The much more sophisticated and personable chatbots of today are the “Eliza effect on steroids,” [Sherry] Turkle said.

  4. 4

    obsoleteMixed with a foreign or inferior substance; not genuine or pure; unrefined, adulterated, impure.

  5. 5

    obsoleteOf a thing: having its meaning changed in a deceptive or misleading way.

Etymology

First English usage circa 1601. From Medieval Latin sophisticatus.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of sophisticatesimple past and past participle of sophisticate

Forms

comparative
more sophisticated
superlative
most sophisticated
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).