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Enhance vs Aggravate - What's the difference?

enhance | aggravate |

As verbs the difference between enhance and aggravate

is that enhance is (obsolete) to lift, raise up while aggravate is to make worse, or more severe; to render less tolerable or less excusable; to make more offensive; to enhance; to intensify.

enhance

English

Alternative forms

* inhance * enhaunce * inhaunce

Verb

(enhanc)
  • (obsolete) To lift, raise up.
  • * 1590 , Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , I.i:
  • nought aghast, his mightie hand enhaunst : / The stroke down from her head vnto her shoulder glaunst.
    (Wyclif Bible)
  • To augment or make something greater.
  • * Southey
  • The reputation of ferocity enhanced the value of their services, in making them feared as well as hated.
  • * 2000 , Mordecai Roshwald, Liberty: Its Meaning and Scope , page 155
  • A hereditary monarch relies on pomp and ceremony, which enhance the respect for the institution
  • To improve something by adding features.
  • * 1986 , Maggie Righetti, Knitting in Plain English , page 192
  • A pom-pom to top off a stocking cap, a fringe to feather the edge of a shawl, tassels to define the points of an afghan, these are just a few of the delightful little goodies that enhance handknit things.
  • To be raised up; to grow larger.
  • A debt enhances rapidly by compound interest.

    Synonyms

    * See also

    aggravate

    English

    Verb

    (aggravat)
  • To make worse, or more severe; to render less tolerable or less excusable; to make more offensive; to enhance; to intensify.
  • To aggravate my woes. —
    To aggravate the horrors of the scene. —.
    The defense made by the prisoner's counsel did rather aggravate than extenuate his crime. —Addison.
  • To give coloring to in description; to exaggerate; as, to aggravate circumstances. — .
  • To exasperate; to provoke, to irritate.
  • * 1748 , (Samuel Richardson), Clarissa :
  • If both were to aggravate her parents, as my brother and sister do mine.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1905, author=
  • , title= , chapter=1 citation , passage=“It is a pity,” he retorted with aggravating meekness, “that they do not use a little common sense. The case resembles that of Columbus' egg, and is every bit as simple. […]”}}
  • * 1977 , (Alistair Horne), A Savage War of Peace , New York Review Books 2006, p. 85:
  • Ben Bella was aggravated by having to express himself in French because the Egyptians were unable to understand his Arabic.

    Usage notes

    * Although the meaning "to exasperate, to annoy" has been in continuous usage since the 16th century, a large number of usage mavens have contested it since the 1870s. Opinions have swayed from this proscription since 1965, but it still garners disapproval in Garner's Modern American Usage (2009), at least for formal writing.

    Synonyms

    * heighten, intensify, increase, magnify, exaggerate, provoke, irritate, exasperate * See also