saturate

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin saturātus, perfect passive participle of saturāre (“to fill full”), from satur (“full”).

verb

1. (transitive) To cause to become completely permeated with, or soaked (especially with a liquid).
   Rain saturated their clothes.
   After walking home in the driving rain, his clothes were saturated.
   Suppose, on the contrary, that a piece of charcoal saturated with hydrogen gas is put into a receiver filled with carbonic acid gas, […] 1815, Annals of Philosophy, volume 6, page 332
2. (transitive, figurative) To fill thoroughly or to excess.
   Modern television is saturated with violence.
3. (transitive, chemistry) To satisfy the affinity of; to cause a substance to become inert by chemical combination with all that it can hold.
   One can saturate phosphorus with chlorine.
4. (transitive, optics) To render pure, or of a colour free from white light.

noun

1. (chemistry) Something saturated, especially a saturated fat.
   Through formation of a double bond, stearic acid (18:0), a saturate, is converted to acid (18:1), a monounsaturate. 1999, Tom Brody, Nutritional Biochemistry, Academic Press, page 363
   We estimate from Table 4 that the average deuterium content in the saturate is approximately 1.1 when palladium is the catalyst, 1.6 when platinum is the catalyst, and 1.7 when rhodium is the catalyst. If there were only deuterium on the surface, the saturate would average 2 deuteriums. 1973, Paul Nels Rylander, Fourth Conference on Catalytic Hydrogenation and Analogous Pressure Reactions

adj

1. Saturated; wet.
   The innocent are gay—the lark is gay, / That dries his feathers, saturate with dew, / Beneath the rosy cloud, while yet the beams / Of dayspring overshoot his humble nest. 1785, William Cowper, “The Task”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), page 23
2. (entomology) Very intense.
   saturate green