sweeten

present singular third person sweetens · participle present sweetening · participle past sweetened · past sweetened

1. transitiveTo make sweet to the taste.

   to sweeten tea

2. transitiveTo make (more) pleasant or to the mind or feelings.

   to sweeten life

   1 more example

   to sweeten friendship

3. transitiveTo make mild or kind; to soften.

   to sweeten the temper

4. transitiveTo make less painful or laborious; to relieve.

   to sweeten the cares of life

   1 more example

   Our God to bless out home delights, / And sweeten every secret tear:— [...]

   1827, [John Keble], “Last Sunday after Trinity”, in The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume II, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B]y W. Baxter, for J. Parker; and C[harles] and J[ohn] Rivington, […], →OCLC, page 99

5. transitiveTo soften to the eye; to make delicate.

   Correggio has made his memory immortal by the strength he has given to his figures, and by sweetening his lights and shadows, and melting them into each other.

   1695, John Dryden, De Arte Graphica

6. transitiveTo make pure and healthful by destroying noxious matter.

   to sweeten the air

   1 more example

   to sweeten rooms or apartments that have been infected

7. transitiveTo make warm and fertile.

   to dry and sweeten soils

8. transitiveagricultureTo raise the pH of (a soil) by adding alkali.

   [T]hey had prepared the garden carefully, plowing and sweetening the dirt with fireplace ashes and manure from the barn[.]

   1997, Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 128

9. transitiveTo restore to purity; to free from taint.

   to sweeten water, butter, or meat

10. transitiveTo make more attractive; said of offers in negotiations.

    to sweeten the deal by increasing the price offered

11. intransitiveTo become sweet.
12. transitiveentertainmentTo supplement (a composition) with additional instruments, especially strings.

    In most popular music the bowed strings usually play long, sustained, sweeping parts, and are sometimes added to a vocal track later in a process known as sweetening.

    2011, Russell Dean Vines, Composing Digital Music For Dummies, page 326

    1 more example

    Rather than employ strings to “sweeten” the songs, Motown's arrangements used strings as a timbral layer, in conjunction with syncopated horn lines, for a fuller sound; […]

    2014, Mellonee V. Burnim, Portia K. Maultsby, African American Music: An Introduction, page 259

plural Sweetens

1. A surname.