temper

Plural: tempers

Noun

• a sudden outburst of anger
  • "his temper sparked like damp firewood"
• a characteristic (habitual or relatively temporary) state of feeling
  • "whether he praised or cursed me depended on his temper at the time"
• a disposition to exhibit uncontrolled anger
  • "his temper was well known to all his employees"
• the elasticity and hardness of a metal object; its ability to absorb considerable energy before cracking
• A general tendency or orientation towards a certain type of mood, a volatile state; a habitual way of thinking, behaving or reacting.
• State of mind; mood.
• A tendency to become angry.
• Anger; a fit of anger.
• Calmness of mind; moderation; equanimity; composure.
• Constitution of body; the mixture or relative proportion of the four humours: blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy.
• Middle state or course; mean; medium.
• The state of any compound substance which results from the mixture of various ingredients; due mixture of different qualities.
• The heat treatment to which a metal or other material has been subjected; a material that has undergone a particular heat treatment.
• The state of a metal or other substance, especially as to its hardness, produced by some process of heating or cooling.
• Milk of lime, or other substance, employed in the process formerly used to clarify sugar.
• A non-plastic material, such as sand, added to clay to prevent shrinkage and cracking during drying or firing; tempering.

Verb

Verb Forms: tempered, tempering, tempers

• To moderate or soften by adding a counterbalancing agent.
• bring to a desired consistency, texture, or hardness by a process of gradually heating and cooling
  • "temper glass"
• harden by reheating and cooling in oil
  • "temper steel"
• adjust the pitch (of pianos)
• make more temperate, acceptable, or suitable by adding something else; moderate
  • "she tempered her criticism"
• restrain
• To moderate or control.
• To strengthen or toughen a material, especially metal, by heat treatment; anneal.
• To adjust the temperature of an ingredient (e.g. eggs or chocolate) gradually so that it remains smooth and pleasing.
• To sauté spices in ghee or oil to release essential oils for flavouring a dish in South Asian cuisine.
• To mix clay, plaster or mortar with water to obtain the proper consistency.
• To adjust, as the mathematical scale to the actual scale, or to that in actual use.
• To govern; to manage.
• To combine in due proportions; to constitute; to compose.
• To mingle in due proportion; to prepare by combining; to modify, as by adding some new element; to qualify, as by an ingredient; hence, to soften; to mollify; to assuage.
• To fit together; to adjust; to accommodate.

Examples

• an outburst of temper
• He had to TEMPER his aggressive play style with more defensive blocks.
• He has quite a temper when dealing with salespeople.
• Puritan austerity was so tempered by Dutch indifference, that mercy itself could not have dictated a milder system.
• Temper your language around children.
• Tempering is a heat treatment technique applied to metals, alloys, and glass to achieve greater toughness by increasing the strength of materials and/or ductility. Tempering is performed by a controlled reheating of the work piece to a temperature below its lower eutectic critical temperature.
• the temper of iron or steel
• the temper of mortar
• to have a good, bad, or calm temper
• to have a hasty temper
• When I heard about it I got myself into a terrible temper.

Synonyms

anneal, biliousness, chasten, harden, humor, humour, irritability, irritation, moderate, mollify, mood, normalize, peevishness, pettishness, pique, season, snappishness, surliness, toughness, disposition, rage, temperament

Related Words

contemper, distemper, temperament, temperance, temperate

Anagrams of temper