Other forms: enhanced, enhancing, enhances
To enhance is to lift the quality or value of something higher. Enhance the flavour, enhance the value, enhanced security.
It means improving something already good rather than fixing something broken. It is heavily used in advertising and in official language, where enhanced usually means slightly better and occasionally means the same. In photography, to enhance an image is to adjust it, and how far that may go before it becomes falsification is a live argument in journalism. Note enhancement; and performance-enhancing, which in sport means banned.
1verbenhanceTo lift the quality or value of something higher.
“A squeeze of lemon juice will enhance the flavour of the fish.”
enhance is an improving.
Also accepted in games: improve
Anglo-Norman enhaucier comes from Latin altus, high — the same root as altitude and exalt. Enhancing something is raising it, which is exactly what the word claims.
Latin
in
Vulgar Latin
*altiare — raise
Anglo-Norman
enhaucier — enhance, raise
Middle English
enhauncen
English, today
enhance
Built from
From Middle English enhauncen, from Anglo-Norman enhaucier (“enhance, raise”), from Vulgar Latin altiare (“raise”), derived from Latin in + altus (“high”). The /h/ in Old French was taken from haut (“high”), where it resulted from Frankish - influence.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA