sweeten

name

1. A surname.

verb

Etymology: From sweet + -en. Eclipsed non-native Middle English doucen and endoucen, borrowed from Old French adoucir and endoucir (“to sweeten”).

1. To make sweet to the taste.

   “to sweeten tea”

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

   “to sweeten life”

   “to sweeten friendship”

3. To make mild or kind; to soften.

   “to sweeten the temper”

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

   “to sweeten the cares of life”

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

5. To 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.”

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

   “to sweeten rooms or apartments that have been infected”

   “to sweeten the air”

7. To make warm and fertile.

   “to dry and sweeten soils”

8. To 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[.]”

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

   “to sweeten water, butter, or meat”

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

    “to sweeten the deal by increasing the price offered”

11. To become sweet.
12. To 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.”

    “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; […]”