adamantize

present singular third person adamantizes · participle present adamantizing · participle past adamantized · past adamantized

1. raretransitiveTo render (something) adamant; to harden; to strengthen.

   Yorkud and his Tunkati developed a crystal transport on their home we planet of Daegis. They found a way to adamantize diamond to withstand propagation in excess of fifty times the speed of light.

   2001, William Alan Rieser, Pmat, […] Writers Club Press, page 85

   4 more examples

   I have known such things begun over the loan of a hymn-book, drawn closer by an exchange of cards, cemented by a morning call, adamantized by a walk, and transformed into a regular life-and-death affair by a proper number of cups of tea. It seems to me an interesting weakness.

   1853 June 18, Eliza Cook, “Making Acquaintances”, in Eliza Cook's Journal, number 216, page 114, column 2

   " I wonder you don't marry, then, sir." " My time is past. Forty years of single blessedness have moulded my character and adamantized my resolutions. Besides, I am a poor man, and a wife is an expensive luxury. […]"

   1859, Frederick William Robinson, “I Finish the Day” (chapter IV), in Woodleigh, volume I, London: Hurst and Blackett, page 231

   Modern science has formulated this in a canon of seeming austerity,—"The survival of the fittest." Oh, yes!—Nature is a disciplinarian. Her storms harden the rocks, and adamantize the mountains. Her tempests root the giant trees deeper, and strengthen the fiber of those that are young.

   c. 1888, Samuel Lockwood, chapter IX, in Animal Memoirs: Birds, New York: Ivison, Blakeman, and Company, page 36

   There must be a fusion of these ingredients, there must be form, there must be control of the material for some great conscious, or perhaps unconscious, end, and if we go on to adamantize our egg into a crystalline lucidity, it will reveal to us the shining truth that any supreme work of art is the product always, or almost always, of a great imagination, the echo of a lofty mind, or of a soul possessing some kind of greatness.

   1940, Logan Pearsall Smith, chapter XV, in Milton and His Modern Critics, Oxford University Press, page 64