DictionaryAI

enhance

verb
in-HANS/ɪnˈhæns/in-HAHNS/ɪnˈhɑːns/

Formsenhances, enhancing, enhanced

5 meanings of enhance

Practice

  1. 1
    verbtransitive
    To make something better by giving it new or additional features.

    Developers enhance the software each year with new features.

    A well-chosen soundtrack can enhance a film's emotional impact.

    Similarimprove, upgrade, enrich, strengthen, heighten

    Oppositeworsen, impair, diminish, degrade

    Note

    Improvement by addition rather than by intensity. Where the "make greater" sense heightens a quality, this one bolts something on. In Maggie Righetti's Knitting in Plain English (1986), pom-poms, fringes and tassels enhance handknit things. A new station enhances an area by what it brings. A useful test is to ask whether something new has been added. If it has, this is the sense.

  2. 2
    verbtransitive
    To increase something or make it greater in size or amount.

    Good lighting enhances the beauty of any room.

    Regular practice can enhance a musician's skill.

    Similarheighten, increase, boost, improve, augment

    Oppositediminish, reduce, lessen, decrease

    Note

    The figurative step from the old "lift up" sense: what is raised becomes greater. Its objects are usually qualities already present, not things being made. Robert Southey (1831) writes of a reputation that enhanced the value of services. Mordecai Roshwald's Liberty (2000) has pomp that enhances respect for an institution. Enhance adds to something that exists. It does not bring it into being.

  3. 3
    verbintransitive
    To be raised up, or to grow larger in size or amount.
    A debt enhances rapidly by compound interest.
    Note

    Here the verb takes no object: the thing itself grows, as when a debt "enhances rapidly by compound interest." It is the self-moving partner of the old "raise up" sense, with the subject doing the rising. Modern writers usually reach for increase or grow in this construction. That makes the intransitive enhance stand out when it appears.

  4. 4
    verbintransitive
    To take up contrast agent, so that an organ, tissue, or lesion shows up more clearly on a scan.

    The lesion began to enhance shortly after the contrast was injected.

    Inflamed tissues often enhance more than normal ones on MRI.

    Note

    Radiologists use the verb with the tissue as its subject: the lesion enhances, and no object is needed. After a contrast agent is given on CT or MRI, a structure that takes it up appears brighter than its surroundings. Reports therefore speak of enhancing lesions and of contrast-enhanced scans. The same structure that enhances is described in everyday terms as showing up.

Less common meaning

  1. 5
    verbobsolete
    To lift or raise something up.
    nought aghast, his mightie hand enhaunst: / The stroke down from her head vnto her shoulder glaunst.
    1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
    Note

    The literal sense the word was built for. Anglo-Norman anhauncer, "to raise", goes back to Latin in and altus, "high", and the h was borrowed from French haut, "high". Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590) has a "mightie hand enhaunst" just before a stroke falls. The sense is obsolete now. In modern prose use lift or raise, and keep enhance for its figurative meanings.

Practice

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Origin

From Middle English enhauncen, anhaunsen, from Anglo-Norman anhauncer (“to enhance, raise”), from Vulgar Latin *inaltiare (“raise”), which comes from Latin in + altus (“high”). The /h/ in Old French came from haut (“high”), where it arose through Frankish influence.