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).

Verb

(en verb)

To moderate or control.

Temper your language around children.

To strengthen or toughen a material, especially metal, by heat treatment; anneal.

Tempering is a heat treatment technique applied to metals, alloys, and glass to achieve greater toughness by increasing the strength of materials and/or ductility. Tempering is performed by a controlled reheating of the work piece to a temperature below its lower eutectic critical temperature.

* Dryden

The tempered metals clash, and yield a silver sound.

To spices in ghee or oil to release essential oils for flavouring a dish in South Asian cuisine.

To mix clay, plaster or mortar with water to obtain the proper consistency.

(music) To adjust, as the mathematical scale to the actual scale, or to that in actual use.

(obsolete, Latinism) To govern; to manage.

* Spenser

With which the damned ghosts he governeth, / And furies rules, and Tartare tempereth .

(archaic) To combine in due proportions; to constitute; to compose.

* 1610 , , act 3 scene 3

You fools! I and my fellows

Are ministers of fate: the elements

Of whom your swords are temper'd may as well

Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs

Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish

One dowle that's in my plume;

(archaic) To mingle in due proportion; to prepare by combining; to modify, as by adding some new element; to qualify, as by an ingredient; hence, to soften; to mollify; to assuage.

* Bancroft

Puritan austerity was so tempered by Dutch indifference, that mercy itself could not have dictated a milder system.

* Otway

Woman! lovely woman! nature made thee / To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

* Byron

But thy fire / Shall be more tempered , and thy hope far higher.

* Addison

She [the Goddess of Justice] threw darkness and clouds about her, that tempered the light into a thousand beautiful shades and colours.

(obsolete) To fit together; to adjust; to accommodate.

* Bible, Wisdom xvi. 21

Thy sustenance serving to the appetite of the eater, tempered itself to every man's liking.