Alembic Alive Uh Lem Bik Noun Apparatus Distilling Substances Refines

1. An apparatus formerly used in distilling substances.

2. Something that refines, purifies, or transforms.

[From Middle English alambic, from Old French, from Medieval Latin alembicus, from Arabic al-anbiq, from al (the) + anbiq (still), from Greek ambix (cup).]

"Melville transforms the shaggy minutiae of life and its myriad characters (whether Hawthorne, Malcolm, a besieged wife or a shipmate) into an alembic of wishes, conflicts and disappointments that, taken together, reflect him, a mysterious, roiling, poignant writer alive, painfully alive, in every phrase he wrote." - Brenda Wineapple, Melville at Sea, The Nation (New York), May 20, 2002.