Verb

(en verb)

To modify.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= A new prescription , passage=As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.}}

To improve or rectify.

* {{quote-magazine, title=Towards the end of poverty

, date=2013-06-01, volume=407, issue=8838, page=11, magazine=(The Economist) citation , passage=But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.}}

To settle an insurance claim.

To change to fit circumstances.

Verb

(assuag)

To lessen the intensity of, to mitigate or relieve (hunger, emotion, pain etc.).

* Addison

Refreshing winds the summer's heat assuage .

* Burke

to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old man

* Byron

the fount at which the panting mind assuages / her thirst of knowledge

* 1864 November 21, Abraham Lincoln (signed) or John Hay, letter to Mrs. Bixby in Boston

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost.

To pacify or soothe (someone).

(obsolete) To calm down, become less violent (of passion, hunger etc.); to subside, to abate.