HARDEN • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Harden

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/hˈɑrdən/ Listen

verb

Harden v. t. (past & past part. hardened; pres. part. hardening)

To make hard or harder; to make firm or compact; to indurate; as, to harden clay or iron.

To accustom by labor or suffering to endure with constancy; to strengthen; to stiffen; to inure; also, to confirm in wickedness or shame; to make unimpressionable. "Harden not your heart." "I would harden myself in sorrow."

Harden v. i.

To become hard or harder; to acquire solidity, or more compactness; as, mortar hardens by drying. "The deliberate judgment of those who knew him (A. Lincoln) has hardened into tradition."

To become confirmed or strengthened, in either a good or a bad sense. "They, hardened more by what might most reclaim."

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Etymology of 'Harden'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Harden" Quotes from Famous Books

... down to relieve her conscience by warning her against seeing too much of the curate. But, as she knew very well, Miss Whichello was too nervous and too much of a lady to give her opinion on questions unasked, and therefore, banishing the defiant look which had begun to harden her face, she waited to hear if it was any other reason than bestowing the jelly which had brought the little old spinster to so disreputable a quarter of the town at so untoward an hour. Finally Miss Whichello's ...

— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... required, then, of course, the seer must resume his part and unseal his mind; but meanwhile, though the reader gets no direct view of him, still he is there in the dialogue with the rest, his speech (like theirs) issues from a hidden mind and has the same dramatic value. It is enough, very likely, to harden our image of him, to give precision to his form, to save him from dissipation into that luminous blur of which I spoke just now. For the author it is a resource to be welcomed on that account, and not ...

— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... Clear Boiling.—This is the most important operation and is often termed "making the soap". The object is to harden the soap ...

— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... they exist in the sap of woods, are soluble in water; and both harden with heat, much the same as the white of an egg, which is almost ...

— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner

... the copper by the affinity of the two metals for each other. As the water and powdered rock passed over the tables, the quicksilver, by reason of its chemical attraction for gold, would gather up the fine particles of that metal and, as the two combined, would gradually harden and form an amalgam, somewhat resembling lead. Coarser grains of gold would lodge in the blankets, owing to their weight, while the small particles of rock would pass over with the water. The amalgam was put into a retort and heated over a fire, when the quicksilver would pass off in vapor ...

— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton

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