aneal

Verb

anneal (third-person singular simple present anneals, present participle annealing, simple past and past participle annealed)

1. To subject to great heat and then (often slow) cooling, and sometimes reheating and further cooling, for the purpose of rendering less brittle; to temper; to toughen.
   • The best tough soft iron, such as will weld round, is drawn into rods by smiths, using charcoal fires, and taking welding heats every time, the rod is about 1.4 inch diameter, 9 or 10 feet long, containing 4lbs. each, tapered at each end to a long point; they are first anealed by being brought to a...1812 March 7, O. E., “The Process of Making Iron Wire”, in H[ezekiah] Niles, editor, The Weekly Register, volume II, number 27, Baltimore, Md.: Printed and published by the editor, at the Franklin...
2. To cool glass slowly, to minimize internal stress.
3. (archaic) To burn colors onto a glass or other surface.
   • It was customary to beautify the Prow with Gold, and various ſorts of Paint and Colours: […] Several other Colours were alſo made uſe of, nor were they barely varniſh'd over with them, but very often anneal'd by Wax melted in the Fire, ſo as neither the Sun, Winds, or Water were able to deface them.1706, John Potter, “Of the Parts, Ornaments, &c. of Ships”, in Archæologia Græca: Or, The Antiquities of Greece, 2nd augmented and improved edition, volume II (Containing I. The Military Affairs of...
4. (ambitransitive) To make a double-stranded nucleic acid by pairing a single strand with a complementary strand.
   • The 5′ junction is checked using a target gene-specific primer of ~21 nucleotides, which anneals upstream of the cassette integration site, together with a primer which anneals downstream of the first loxP site in the PCR cassette.2007, Celine I. Maeder, Peter Maier, Michael Knop, “A Guided Tour to PCR-based Genomic Manipulations of S. Cerevisiae (PCR-targeting)”, in Ian Stansfield, Michael J. R. Stark, editors, Yeast Gene...
5. (archaic, figuratively, poetic) To strengthen or harden.
   • The experience annealed them, strengthening their resolve.

   Synonyms:

   indurate

See all 6 meanings of anneal

Verb

anele (third-person singular simple present aneles, present participle aneling, simple past and past participle aneled)

1. (obsolete) To anoint; to give extreme unction with oil.