Other forms: deafening, deafened
To deafen is to make somebody unable to hear, at least for a while. Deafened by the blast, a deafening roar, deafen the crowd.
Noise damage is cumulative and permanent, and the danger is loudness times time — a rock concert and a year of machinery do the same work. A deafening silence is one so complete it draws attention. Note the -en ending, making a verb from an adjective.
1verbdeafenTo make somebody unable to hear.
“The music in the club was so loud that it almost deafened us.”
deafen is a damaging of hearing.
Deaf plus -en. Old English had adeafian with the same sense, and the modern form was rebuilt from the adjective.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰewbʰ-
Middle English
def
English
deaf
English, today
deafen
From deaf + -en. Compare Middle English deven, deaven (“to make deaf”), Old English ādēafian (“to deafen”) and ādȳfan, Dutch verdoven (“to stupefy, deafen”), German betäuben (“to stun, stupefy, deafen”). deaf comes from Middle English def. From Middle English def, deef, from Old English dēaf, from Proto-West Germanic daub (“deaf”), from Proto-Germanic daubaz (“deaf or stunned”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰewbʰ- (“to whisk, smoke, darken, obscure”). Cognate with Ancient Greek τυφλός (“blind”). See also dumb. a doublet of daff and dof and dowf. Cognate with Dutch doof, German taub, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål døv, Norwegian Nynorsk dauv, Swedish döv, Faroese deyvur, Icelandic daufur.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA