tempered

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of temper.

   The judge tempered her sentence with mercy, given the defendant's age.

   She tempered the eggs with a little hot milk so they wouldn't scramble.

   Note

   The form is regular in both jobs: the simple past (the smith tempered the blade) and the participle after have or be (the eggs had been tempered). Cooking gives the verb two quite different uses, easing eggs or chocolate through a change of heat and, in South Asian kitchens, frying spices in ghee or oil to release their flavor, so a recipe's tempered depends on the cuisine.

2. 2
   adjectivein compounds

   Having the kind of temperament or disposition indicated by the word it is joined to.

   She was a good-tempered nurse who could calm even the most frightened patient.

   The bad-tempered old engine coughed twice and stalled before it finally caught.

   Note

   It lives only in compounds whose first part names the disposition: even-tempered, sweet-tempered, short-tempered, bad-tempered. The hyphen stays whether the compound comes before a noun or after a verb (a short-tempered boss; he is short-tempered), and the compounds reach beyond people: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) has a sweet-tempered little breeze.

3. 3
   adjective

   Softened or kept in balance by competing factors or concerns.

   Her tempered optimism about the merger won over a cautious board.

   The team's joy at the win was tempered by news of their captain's injury.

   Similarmoderate, measured, reasonable, mild, temperate

   Oppositeunbridled, unrestrained, extreme

   Note

   Old English already used the participle for "moderate, governed", so this is among the word's oldest jobs. It usually takes by and whatever does the balancing: joy tempered by sorrow, or, for Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, sensibility tempered by reflection. Thackeray's The History of Pendennis bends the old proverb about the wind tempered to the shorn lamb.

4. 4
   adjective

   Relating to the industrial process for toughening glass, or describing glass that has been toughened by it.

   When the tempered panel shattered, it crumbled into thousands of small, blunt pebbles.

   We replaced the patio door with tempered safety glass after the old pane cracked.

5. 5
   adjective

   Relating to the metallurgical process used to finish metals, or describing metal finished by it.

   Each spring is cut from tempered steel so it returns to shape after years of use.

   The smith ran a file along the tempered edge to test its hardness.

   Similarhardened

   Note

   In metalworking, tempering comes after hardening: freshly quenched steel is hard but brittle, and reheating it to a lower temperature trades a little hardness for toughness. That is why springs, blades and tools are made of tempered steel. Melville's Ahab, in Moby-Dick (1851), boasts of harpoon barbs tempered in blood and tempered by lightning.

6. 6
   adjective

   Relating to a well-tempered scale, in which a keyboard's twelve notes per octave are tuned so that music in any major or minor key can be played without sounding noticeably out of tune.

   The harpsichordist chose a tempered tuning so the program could range across all twenty-four keys.

   On a tempered keyboard, the pianist can move to a distant key without anything sounding sour.

   Note

   Tuning a keyboard means accepting a compromise: a tempered scale nudges most intervals slightly away from their acoustically pure ratios so that no key sounds badly out of tune. Equal temperament, the usual piano tuning today, spreads the compromise evenly across all twelve notes; older well-tempered tunings spread it unevenly, so each key kept a color of its own.

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