Word.ws English Dictionary

sighten

sighten verb: to add a fugitive colour to (a paste), to enable the printer to determine whether the figures are well-printed or not.

Verb

sighten (third-person singular simple present sightens, present participle sightening, simple past and past participle sightened)

  1. (transitive, calico-printing) To add a fugitive colour to (a paste), to enable the printer to determine whether the figures are well-printed or not.
    • The iron liquor should be sightened with logwood.1830, Samuel Frederick Gray, The Chemistry of the Arts
    • Annexed is a specimen of calico in this stage of the process, the mordant on which is red liquor, “sightened” with a little decoction of peach-wood or similar dye-stuff.1849, Edward Andrew Parnell, Dyeing and Calico-printing, page 132

Forms of sighten

third-person singular presentsightens
present participlesightening
past participlesightened
pastsightened

Origin of sighten

From sight + -en.

Words formed from sighten

Questions about sighten

What does sighten mean?
Sighten means to add a fugitive colour to (a paste), to enable the printer to determine whether the figures are well-printed or not.
What part of speech is sighten?
Sighten is a verb.
What is the past tense of sighten?
The past tense of sighten is sightened.

Words near sighten in the dictionary

  1. sightbite
  2. sightbites
  3. sighted
  4. sighted in
  5. sightedness
  6. sighten
  7. sightened
  8. sightening
  9. sightenings
  10. sightens
  11. sighter

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sighten (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sighten.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sighten. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.