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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
deaden
verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ He drank alcohol to deaden the pain.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Alcohol serves to deaden feelings which the individual can not manage, or wishes to avoid.
▪ Before that time, alcohol had been in general use to deaden pain, though some sturdy souls rejected it on principle.
▪ If he couldn't lose the feeling, perhaps he could deaden it.
▪ It would be spring soon, but I had been too deadened to notice.
▪ Repetition is considered to be deadening, boring, thoughtless.
▪ Soundposts are an important feature of bowed instruments but are unsuitable for plucked instruments and will deaden the sound of a dulcimer.
▪ When you listen to the radio, the music deadens your rhythm and causes you to create uniform sentences.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Deaden

Deaden \Dead"en\ (d[e^]d"'n), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Deadened (d[e^]d"'nd); p. pr. & vb. n. Deadening.] [From Dead; cf. AS. d?dan to kill, put to death. See Dead, a.]

  1. To make as dead; to impair in vigor, force, activity, or sensation; to lessen the force or acuteness of; to blunt; as, to deaden the natural powers or feelings; to deaden a sound.

    As harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.
    --Longfellow.

  2. To lessen the velocity or momentum of; to retard; as, to deaden a ship's headway.

  3. To make vapid or spiritless; as, to deaden wine.

  4. To deprive of gloss or brilliancy; to obscure; as, to deaden gilding by a coat of size.

  5. To render impervious to sound, as a wall or floor; to deafen.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
deaden

1660s "deprive of or diminish (some quality)," from dead (adj.) + -en (1). Earlier the verb was simply dead. Related: Deadened; deadening.

Wiktionary
deaden

vb. 1 (context transitive English) To render less lively; to diminish; to muffle. 2 (context intransitive English) To become less lively; to diminish (by itself). 3 (context transitive English) To make soundproof.

WordNet
deaden
  1. v. make vague or obscure or make (an image) less visible; "muffle the message" [syn: dampen, damp]

  2. cut a girdle around so as to kill by interrupting the circulation of water and nutrients; "girdle the plant" [syn: girdle]

  3. make vapid or deprive of spirit; "deadened wine"

  4. lessen the momentum or velocity of; "deaden a ship's headway"

  5. become lifeless, less lively, intense, or active; lose life, force, or vigor

  6. make less lively, intense, or vigorous; impair in vigor, force, activity, or sensation; "Terror blunted her feelings"; "deaden a sound" [syn: blunt] [ant: enliven]

  7. convert (metallic mercury) into a grey powder consisting of minute globules, as by shaking with chalk or fatty oil

Usage examples of "deaden".

A tremendous squeal of tires was followed by a deadening crash as the Alfa hit the truck full on.

We are only 80 feet from the centre of the orgy, but the location of doorways and arrangement of walls between us quite deadens the sound, does it not!

Using a Canon T 70 with a 135mm lens, Fogle watched as the men donned white robes, bowed to pray, and then put on ear protectors to deaden the noise before firing weapons smuggled in from the Afghan front.

Deadened by the weight of my body and the hardness of the boards, it had lost warmth, motion, and all sensation.

A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river.

I practised my profession in the capital city of a state ruled over by a maharajah, who, although he had been a brave and honourable man in his prime, had degenerated into a mere voluptuary, spending his days in the companionship of nautch girls and disreputable men, indulging constantly in immoderate potations of strong wine, and given at times to the use of bhang, which does more than anything else to dull the faculties and deaden the conscience of the unfortunate who surrenders himself to its seductive spells.

Beneath that cone of neat grey felt, behind the dreary, tallowed pigment of his face, which had that thickened, stunned, and deadened look one often sees upon the faces of old bruisers, as if the violent and furious assault of stone and steel, the million harsh metallic clangours, the brutal stupefaction of the streets, at length had dried the flesh and thickened the skin, and blunted, numbed and calloused the aching tumult of the tortured and tormented senses--there still flowed blood as red and wet as any which ever swarmed into the earth below the laurel bush.

His paws were deadened by the tight bonds, but his rage was aroused and his jaws were strong.

If hospital service makes young students less tender of suffering, vivisection deadens their humanity, and begets indifference to it.

When the sterilizer beeped off, she deadened the skin with a spray from the cart.

Jack sat in the staging area alone, smoking a stim very leisurely, watching the red ash glow briefly in the darkness, before it deadened.

For hence he grew capable of communion with her in all her moods, undisabled either by the deadening effects of present, or the aversion consequent on past suffering.

Here is the world humanity has made: will you take full citizenship in it, or will you live in it as dull, as slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as the idlers for whom civilization has no uses, or the deadened toilers, men or beasts, whose labor shuts the door on choice?

He moved with the lumbering inevitability of a landslide, but as far as I could tell his only real qualifications seemed to be arms the size of axletrees and enough scar tissue to deaden the impact of a piled river.

The equatorial current, running towards the Saintes channel, was against Bucephalas, but the steady trades proved powerful enough to overcome the deadening effect of the leeway.