To enable to withstand physical or mental hardship.
To make unfeeling, unsympathetic, or callous: "To love love and not its meaning hardens the heart in monstrous ways"(Archibald MacLeish).
To make sharp, as in outline.
To protect (nuclear weapons) by surrounding with earth or concrete.
v.
intr.
To become hard or harder.
To rise and become stable. Used of prices.
To become inured.
Synonyms: These verbs mean to make resistant to hardship, especially through continued exposure: was hardened to frontier life; is acclimated to the tropical heat; was acclimatized by long hours to overwork; became seasoned to life in prison; toughened by experience.
used of persons; emotionally hardened; "faced a case-hardened judge" [syn: case-hardened]
2.
made hard or flexible or resilient especially by heat treatment; "a sword of tempered steel"; "tempered glass" [syn: tempered] [ant: unhardened]
3.
protected against attack (especially by nuclear weapons); "hardened missile silos" [ant: soft]
4.
made tough by habitual exposure; "hardened fishermen"; "a peasant, dark, lean-faced, wind-inured"- Robert Lynd; "our successors...may be graver, more inured and equable men"- V.S.Pritchett [syn: enured]
Hard"en\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Hardened; p. pr. & vb. n. Hardening.] [OE. hardnen, hardenen.]1. To make hard or harder; to make firm or compact; to indurate; as, to harden clay or iron. 2. 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." --Ps. xcv. 8. I would harden myself in sorrow. --Job vi. 10.
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