Other forms: freshened, freshening, freshens
To freshen is to make something smell and feel new again. Freshen the room, freshen up, freshen the air.
Freshen up is what people do to themselves before going out, and it is a polite euphemism for using the lavatory in some contexts. Of a room it means airing and cleaning. Of a drink it means topping it up. In sailing, the wind freshens when it strengthens, which is a technical use. Note refresh, which does the same work for people and screens.
1verbfreshenTo make something smell and feel new again.
“Open the windows to freshen the room after the party.”
2verbstrengthenTo strengthen, of the wind.
“The wind freshened to roughly force four.”
freshen is a making fresh.
Middle English
fressh
English
fresh
English, today
freshen
From fresh + -en. fresh comes from Middle English fressh. From Middle English fressh, from Old English fersċ (“fresh, pure, sweet”), from Proto-West Germanic frisk (“fresh”), from Proto-Germanic friskaz (“fresh”), from Proto-Indo-European preysk- (“fresh”). The verb is from Middle English freshen (“to freshen”), from the adjective. Cognate with Scots fresch (“fresh”), West Frisian farsk (“fresh”), Dutch vers (“fresh”), wa frexh (“fresh”), German frisch (“fresh”), French frais (“fresh”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk frisk (“fresh”), Swedish frisk (“well, fresh”), Icelandic ferskur (“fresh”), Lithuanian prėskas (“unflavoured, tasteless, fresh”), Russian пре́сный (“sweet, fresh, unleavened, tasteless”). a doublet of fresco and frisk.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA