tempered
adjective
1. made hard or flexible or resilient especially by heat treatment
- a sword of tempered steel
- tempered glass
Similar word(s): curable, sunbaked, hardened, toughened, treated
2. adjusted or attuned by adding a counterbalancing element
- criticism tempered with kindly sympathy
Sentences with tempered as an adjective:
- The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale. — Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, Chapter 19.
- 1851 "Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming -- "Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life!" — Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
- 1792 The downcast eye, the rosy blush, the retiring grace, are all proper in their season; but modesty, being the child of reason, cannot long exist with the sensibility that is not tempered by reflection — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
verb
1. simple past tense and past participle of temper