Other forms: mending, mended, mends
To mend something is to put it right so it can be used again — a torn sleeve, a broken fence, a puncture in a bicycle tyre. Needle and thread, glue, a patch cut from an old shirt.
It also means to heal: a broken wrist mends in six weeks, and a person getting better after illness is on the mend. Relationships mend too — they mended their friendship after years of silence, and you mend fences with a neighbour you fell out with. Repair is the wider, cooler word, the one for roads and engines, so you mend a jumper but the garage repairs your car. Mend also has an old proverb still in use: least said, soonest mended.
1verbmendTo repair something broken or torn so that it can be used again.
“He mended the chair with two screws and a little glue.”
2verbhealTo heal, or to become healthy again.
“The bone should mend without an operation.”
3verbputTo put a damaged relationship right.
“They mended things over a long lunch in the spring.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Mend is amend with the front bitten off. Middle English menden was a shortened form of amenden, which came from Old French amender and Latin ēmendāre, from mendum, a defect or fault. To mend is to take the fault out of a thing, and mend, amend and emend are three sizes of one idea.
Proto-Indo-European
*mend- — defect; fault
Latin
ēmendāre
Old French
amender — to cure; to fix, repair; to set right, correct
Anglo-Norman
amender
Middle English
menden — to cure; to do good to, benefit; to do or make better, improve; to get better, recover; to keep in a good state; to put right, amend; to reform, repent
English, today
mend
Built from
From Middle English menden (“to cure; to do good to, benefit; to do or make better, improve; to get better, recover; to keep in a good state; to put right, amend; to reform, repent”), the aphetic form of amenden (“to alter, change (especially for the better); to atone; to chastise, punish; to correct, remedy, amend; to cure; to excel, surpass; to forgive; to get or make better, improve; to make ready; to mend, repair, restore; to get well, recover; to relieve”), or from its etymon Anglo-Norman amender and Old French amender (“to cure; to fix, repair; to set right, correct”) (modern French amender), from Latin ēmendāre, the present active infinitive of ēmendō (“to atone; to chastise, punish; to correct, remedy, amend; to cure”), from ē- (variant of ex-) + mendum (“defect; error, fault”) (from Proto-Indo-European mend- (“defect; fault”)) + -ō.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA