thinned

Verb

thin (third-person singular simple present thins, present participle thinning, simple past and past participle thinned)

1. (transitive) To make thin or thinner.
   • Exhausted fathers thinned the blood,
     You curse the legacy of pain;
     Darling of an infected brood,
     You feel disaster climb the vein.1941, Theodore Roethke, “Feud”, in Open House, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →OCLC; republished in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, London: Faber and Faber […], 1968, →OCLC, page 4
2. (intransitive) To become thin or thinner.
   • The crowds thinned after the procession had passed: there was nothing more to see.
3. To dilute.
4. To remove some plants or parts of plants in order to improve the growth of what remains.
   • So floriferous are Asian pears, and the tree so laden with young fruit, that as the tree approaches maturity it is worth considering thinning the fruit (I can't quite bring myself to thin the flowers) so as to neither overburden the tree for this year nor tire it for the next. Thinning early in the...2015 September 5, Mark Diacono, “In praise of the Asian pear”, in The Daily Telegraph (Gardening), archived from the original on 12 Sep 2015, page 3

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