Other forms: isolated, isolating, isolates
To isolate something is to cut it off from everything around it and leave it on its own. A patient moved into a side room, a village left alone by a week of snow, one wire lifted out of a bundle so you can test it.
It works on people and on things. Isolate a person and you leave them lonely; isolated is the adjective for both the person and the farmhouse with no neighbours. Science leans on it hard: researchers isolate a virus, a gene, a fault, meaning they pull one thing out of the mess around it so they can look at it alone. In a lab the noun isolate — EYE-so-lat, with the last syllable flattened — is the sample that has been separated out. Keep it apart from insulate, which is wrapping something to hold heat or electricity in.
1verbisolateTo separate someone or something from everything else and keep it apart.
“The storm isolated the village for four days.”
2verbsickTo keep a sick person or animal away from others so an infection does not spread.
“Anyone with symptoms had to isolate at home for a week.”
3verbfindTo find one thing among many and separate it out so it can be studied or repaired.
“The engineers isolated the fault to a single circuit board.”
4nounorganismA single organism or substance that has been separated from a sample.
“The isolate was sent to another lab for sequencing.”
Also accepted in games: separate
Isolate came into English backwards. English first borrowed the adjective isolated, from French isole, itself from Italian isolato and Latin insulatus; only afterwards did speakers trim the ending and make a verb out of it. That same Latin word also gave English insulate, which is why the two look like twins and do different jobs.
Latin
īnsulātus
Italian
isolato
French
isolé
English, today
isolate
a back-formation from isolated, from French isolé, from Italian isolato, from Latin īnsulātus (whence also insulate), see -ate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA