widen
Formswidens, widening, widened
- 1
- 2To become wider or more open.
The gap between the two leading teams continued to widen.
The valley widens as the trail descends toward the river.
Note
A verb built straight from its adjective: wide plus the verbal suffix -en, which turns a quality into a process. Without an object, it describes something growing wider by itself, like eyes that widen in surprise or alarm, a gap, or a valley. When someone does the widening to something else, the word becomes its causative partner.
- 3To broaden or extend something in scope or range.
The company hopes to widen its customer base across Europe.
The new policy widened access to healthcare for rural families.
Similarbroaden, expand, extend
Oppositenarrow, restrict, limit
Note
The figurative stretch of the word, where what grows is reach rather than width. Its objects are abstract: an investigation, an organization's activities, a set of rights. Police widen their enquiries, and a campaign widens rights for a group. Unlike the physical sense, nothing measurable gets wider. The change is in how much the thing covers, which puts it close to broaden and extend.
- 4
- 5To convert a value to a data type that can hold a larger range of distinct values.
Compilers automatically widen a byte to an integer during arithmetic.
The function widens the input to a 64-bit type before processing it.
Similarpromote
Oppositenarrow
Note
A programmer's term for moving a value into a roomier type, such as a short into an int. The larger type can represent every value the smaller one can, so the number survives unchanged, and such conversions are typically implicit. The reverse operation is narrowing, which can lose information when the value does not fit the smaller type.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of widen apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Formed from the adjective "wide" combined with the verb-forming suffix "-en".