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assuage

UK/əˈsweɪd͡ʒ/US/əˈswɑʒ/
verbC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,619 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: assuaged, assuaging, assuages

To assuage is to make a painful feeling less sharp. Assuage his guilt, assuage fears, assuage the pain.

It takes feelings rather than people, so fears and grief are assuaged and nobody is. It is said as a-swayj, and the Latin behind it means to sweeten.

Definitions of assuage

  1. 1verbassuageTo make a painful feeling less sharp.C2

    “The manager tried to assuage the customers' anger by offering free drinks.”

assuage is a soothing.

Where it comes from

Old French asuagier comes from a Latin word meaning to sweeten, from suavis, sweet.

  1. Latin

    ad-

  2. Vulgar Latin

    *assuāviō — to sweeten, to butter up, to calm

  3. Old French

    asuagier — to appease, to calm

  4. Middle English

    aswagen

  5. English, today

    assuage

Built from

  • suāvis · Latin — sweet

From Middle English aswagen, from Old French asuagier (“to appease, to calm”), from Vulgar Latin assuāviō (“to sweeten, to butter up, to calm”), derived from Latin ad- + suāvis (“sweet”) + -iō.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

assuage in the wild

  • To assuage Franco, the film was screened as The Bare Breasted Countess at the 2009 Fantastic Fest in the United States, which Franco attended as guest of honor.

    Female Vampire

  • Some think Nero used his marriage to Sporus to assuage the guilt he felt for allegedly kicking his pregnant wife Poppaea to death.

    Sporus

  • The film, like the book, is an attempt to attribute and assuage patent and discrete levels of guilt.

    Souvenir (1988 film)

  • Methods used to try to assuage or please the smallpox demon were using a sanshin, a musical instrument, "lion dances, flowers, incense, and poetry.

    Smallpox demon

  • The term console derives from the compound Latin verb consolor "to alleviate, lighten", from the verb solor, "to assuage, soothe, relieve, mitigate", plus the preposition con/com/cum, "with".

    Console table

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.