Word.ws English Dictionary

smartening

smartening is the present participle and gerund of smarten.

Meaning of smarten

Verb

smarten (third-person singular simple present smartens, present participle smartening, simple past and past participle smartened)

  1. (transitive) To make smarter in appearance; to refurbish or spruce up.
    • The Sorting Ceremony will take place in a few minutes in front of the rest of the school. I suggest you all smarten yourselves up as much as you can while you are waiting.1997 June 26, J. K. Rowling [pseudonym; Joanne Rowling], Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harry Potter; 1), London: Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN
  2. (transitive) To increase the speed of (one's travel on foot, etc.).
    • I braced myself and smartened my pace, shouldering my way through the crowd.2001, Vernon Robinson, If I Should Die Before I Wake, page 264
  3. (transitive) To augment with computer technology.
    • How do we achieve this smartening of the grid? The CALM approach in the future will be to use reinforcement learning (RL) controllers as a basis for optimizing the synergy between operators and automation.2008, Roger Neeson Anderson, Albert Boulanger, John A. Johnson, Computer-aided Lean Management for the Energy Industry, page 335
    Synonyms:
    computerize

Phrases with smartening

Questions about smartening

What is smartening the present participle and gerund of?
Smartening is the present participle and gerund of smarten.

Words near smartening in the dictionary

  1. smarted off
  2. smarten
  3. smarten up
  4. smartened
  5. smartened up
  6. smartening
  7. smartening up
  8. smartens
  9. smartens up
  10. smarter
  11. smartest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smartening (page history and authors); smarten (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.

Last updated:

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