Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1775; see de- + phlogiston. Related: Dephlogisticated; dephlogisticating.
Wiktionary
vb. To take away the phlogiston, i.e. ability to burn, which is now understood to be chemically impossible
Usage examples of "dephlogisticate".
Recall that to Priestley, oxygen was dephlogisticated air, while Cavendish believed that oxygen was water from which all of the phlogiston had been removed.
I wish we could catch the air inside the glass and do more experiments to see how it really differs in quality from what Stahl would call the dephlogisticated air around us, but I say nothing of this to my father.
Priestley, reporting on his latest experiences with dephlogisticated air.
Joseph Priestley was working with dephlogisticated air—his name for oxygen—in the 1770s, and Darwin would indeed have been keen to attend the Lunar Society meeting and hear of the latest progress.
Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion.
Joseph Priestley was working with dephlogisticated airhis name for oxygenin the 1770s, and Darwin would indeed have been keen to attend the Lunar Society meeting and hear of the latest progress.