Word.ws English Dictionary

sweeten

Syllables: sweet·en/ˈswiːtən/

sweeten verb: to make sweet to the taste.

Verb

sweeten (third-person singular simple present sweetens, present participle sweetening, simple past and past participle sweetened)

  1. (transitive) To make sweet to the taste.
    • to sweeten tea
  2. (transitive) To make (more) pleasant or to the mind or feelings.
    • to sweeten life
    • to sweeten friendship
  3. (transitive) To make mild or kind; to soften.
    • to sweeten the temper
  4. (transitive) To make less painful or laborious; to relieve.
    • to sweeten the cares of life
    • Our God to bless out home delights, / And sweeten every secret tear:— [...]1827, [John Keble], “Last Sunday after Trinity”, in The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume II, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B]y W. Baxter, for J....
  5. (transitive) To soften to the eye; to make delicate.
    • Correggio has made his memory immortal by the strength he has given to his figures, and by sweetening his lights and shadows, and melting them into each other.1695, John Dryden, De Arte Graphica
  6. (transitive) To make pure and healthful by destroying noxious matter.
    • to sweeten the air
    • to sweeten rooms or apartments that have been infected
  7. (transitive) To make warm and fertile.
    • to dry and sweeten soils
  8. (transitive) To raise the pH of (a soil) by adding alkali.
    • [T]hey had prepared the garden carefully, plowing and sweetening the dirt with fireplace ashes and manure from the barn[.]1997, Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 128
  9. (transitive) To restore to purity; to free from taint.
    • to sweeten water, butter, or meat
  10. (transitive) To make more attractive; said of offers in negotiations.
    • to sweeten the deal by increasing the price offered
  11. (intransitive) To become sweet.
  12. (transitive) To supplement (a composition) with additional instruments, especially strings.
    • In most popular music the bowed strings usually play long, sustained, sweeping parts, and are sometimes added to a vocal track later in a process known as sweetening.2011, Russell Dean Vines, Composing Digital Music For Dummies, page 326
    • Rather than employ strings to “sweeten” the songs, Motown's arrangements used strings as a timbral layer, in conjunction with syncopated horn lines, for a fuller sound; […]2014, Mellonee V. Burnim, Portia K. Maultsby, African American Music: An Introduction, page 259

Proper noun capitalized: Sweeten

Sweeten (plural Sweetens)

  1. A surname.

sweeten meaning in Tamil, Malayalam and Indonesian

sweeten in Tamil

இனிப்பு உண்டாக்கு

sweeten in Malayalam

to sweeten
മധുരിക്കുക madhurikkuka

sweeten in Indonesian

to make sweet to the taste
mempermanis, memaniskan

Examples of sweeten in a sentence

  • He sweetened the pot since there were no takers in the office pool.
  • No one's interested. You need to sweeten the pot.
  • I sweetened up the barbecue sauce by adding some sugar.

All 40 example sentences with sweeten

Antonyms of sweeten

Forms of sweeten

Verb
third-person singular presentsweetens
present participlesweetening
past participlesweetened
pastsweetened
Proper noun
pluralSweetens

Past tense of sweeten: sweetened

Origin of sweeten

From sweet + -en. Eclipsed non-native Middle English doucen and endoucen, borrowed from Old French adoucir and endoucir (“to sweeten”).

Words formed from sweeten

Words that rhyme with sweeten

Questions about sweeten

What does sweeten mean?
Sweeten means to make sweet to the taste.
What is sweeten in Tamil?
Sweeten in Tamil is இனிப்பு உண்டாக்கு. See Sweeten meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is sweeten?
Sweeten can be a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce sweeten?
Sweeten is pronounced /ˈswiːtən/.
What is the past tense of sweeten?
The past tense of sweeten is sweetened.

Words near sweeten in the dictionary

  1. sweetcorns
  2. sweetcure
  3. sweete
  4. sweeted
  5. sweetely
  6. sweeten
  7. sweeten the pill
  8. sweeten the pot
  9. sweeten up
  10. sweetened
  11. sweetened the pill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweeten (page history and authors); Sweeten (page history and authors); sweeten (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); മധുരിക്കുക (Malayalam) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-sweeten.ogg.

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