enhanced

1. 1
   adjective

   Made better or improved beyond some standard or ordinary version.

   The enhanced edition includes director commentary and restored footage.

   Customers preferred the enhanced model for its longer battery life.

   Similarimproved, upgraded, deluxe

   Oppositestandard, basic

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of enhance.

   The director enhanced the scene with subtle lighting.

   Security has been enhanced at all major airports.

   Note

   Regular throughout, with one form doing double duty. Most uses are transitive and often passive (security was enhanced, a scene enhanced with lighting). Radiology, however, has an intransitive use: a tissue or lesion that takes up contrast agent is said to have enhanced, with no object at all. The verb's oldest meaning, to lift or raise up, is obsolete and lingers in the "raised up" adjective.

3. 3
   adjective

   Raised, increased, or made more intense.

   Enhanced bass made the music feel powerful in the small club.

   The amplifier produced an enhanced, fuller tone across the room.

   Similarheightened, amplified

   Oppositereduced, diminished

   Note

   Here the adjective keeps the verb's first, physical meaning: to lift or raise up, a use now obsolete in the verb itself. It appears in heraldry, as in Col. H. C. B. Rogers's "Railway Heraldry" for Railway Magazine (1956), describing a shield. In everyday English the sense has drifted from height to intensity, as in enhanced bass or an enhanced tone. These are things made louder or stronger rather than better.

4. 4
   adjectiveeuphemistic

   Having used anabolic steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs to build muscle or boost athletic performance.

   The forum spent hours debating whether the champion was natural or enhanced.

   Enhanced bodybuilders often reach a size that drug-free athletes cannot match.

   Oppositenatural

   Note

   A gym-floor euphemism that lets bodybuilders say "on steroids" without saying it. Its standing opposite is natural, and the pair sorts the sport into camps. Brad Borland in 2020 sets "big, enhanced mass monsters" against natural bodybuilders and physique competitors. Outside the sport the word reads as the "improved" meaning, so calling an athlete enhanced is clear only where the drug question is already in the air.

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