HARDENING • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Hardening

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/hˈɑrdənɪŋ/ /hˈɑrdnɪŋ/ 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."

noun

Hardening n.

Making hard or harder.

That which hardens, as a material used for converting the surface of iron into steel.

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Etymology of 'Hardening'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Hardening" Quotes from Famous Books

... handful of gold-dust with one of the sailors accompanying Columbus for some tool, and then ran for his life to the woods lest the sailor should repent his bargain and call him back. The Mexicans had coins of tin shaped like a letter T. We can understand this, for tin was necessary to them in hardening their bronze implements, and it may have been the highest type of metallic value among them. A round copper coin with a serpent stamped on it was found at Palenque, and T-shaped copper coins are very abundant in the ruins of Central America. This too we can ...

— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... at least would miss her dreadfully. Still she nourished a hope that Mamma would say she should not go; but Mamma always submitted to the decrees of authority, and Wilmet and Felix were her authorities now. Sister Constance felt no misgiving lest Wilmet were hardening, when she heard the sweet discretion and cheerful tenderness with which she propounded the arrangement to the sick mother, without giving her the worry of decision, yet still deferentially enough to keep her in her place as the head of ...

— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the cold became so keen that I rose and went to the side of a flickering fire. Here excessive misery was for a moment hardening the hearts it should have softened. Several prisoners were quarreling for a position nearest the embers, each angrily claiming that he had brought the fagots that were burning! Two or three hours later several of us attempted to slip past the sentries ...

— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague

... and hardening himself against all anticipations of the ill consequences or scandal which might arise from such a measure, the manly hearted smith resolved to set evil report at defiance, and give the wanderer a night's refuge in his own house. It must be added, that ...

— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... state of things, that there will be no more nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is at ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

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