Verb

To describe or characterize something by listing its qualities.

To make someone, or to become competent or eligible for some position or task.

* Macaulay

He had qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession.

To certify or license someone for something.

To modify, limit, restrict or moderate something; especially to add conditions or requirements for an assertion to be true.

*1598 , Shakespeare,

*:O! never say that I was false of heart,

*:Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify

To mitigate, alleviate (something); to make less disagreeable.

* 1590 , Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , II.vi:

he balmes and herbes thereto applyde, / And euermore with mighty spels them charmd, / That in short space he has them qualifyde , / And him restor'd to health, that would haue algates dyde.

To compete successfully in some stage of a competition and become eligible for the next stage.

To give individual quality to; to modulate; to vary; to regulate.

* Sir Thomas Browne

It hath no larynx to qualify the sound.

(juggling) To throw and catch each object at least twice.

Verb

To bring down the size, quantity, quality, value or intensity of something; to diminish, to lower, to impair.

* to reduce weight, speed, heat, expenses, price, personnel etc.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01

, author=Stephen Ledoux , title=Behaviorism at 100 , volume=100, issue=1, page=60 , magazine= citation , passage=Becoming more aware of the progress that scientists have made on behavioral fronts can reduce the risk that other natural scientists will resort to mystical agential accounts when they exceed the limits of their own disciplinary training.}}

To lose weight.

To bring to an inferior rank; to degrade, to demote.

* to reduce a sergeant to the ranks

* An ancient but reduced family. --.

* Nothing so excellent but a man may fasten upon something belonging to it, to reduce it. --.

* Having reduced their foe to misery beneath their fears. -- .

* Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced . --.

*

Neither [Jones] nor I (in 1966) could conceive of reducing our "science" to the ultimate absurdity of reading Finnish newspapers almost a century and a half old in order to establish "priority."

To humble; to conquer; to subdue; to capture.

* to reduce a province or a fort

To bring to an inferior state or condition.

* to reduce a city to ashes

(cooking) To decrease the liquid content of food by boiling much of its water off.

(chemistry) To add electrons / hydrogen or to remove oxygen.

(metallurgy) To produce metal from ore by removing nonmetallic elements in a smelter.

(mathematics) To simplify an equation or formula without changing its value.

(legal) To convert to written form (Usage note: this verb almost always take the phrase "to writing").

* It is important that all business contracts be reduced to writing.

(medicine) To perform a reduction; to restore a fracture or dislocation to the correct alignment.

(military) To reform a line or column from (a square).