Other forms: tenses, tensed, tensing
Tense is what you are when you cannot let your shoulders drop. Waiting outside an exam room, listening to a car that will not start, sitting at a table where two people have stopped speaking to each other — all tense.
The word works on people and on situations alike: a tense man, a tense silence, a tense five minutes before the results come through. Its physical meaning is pulled tight, and that is where the feeling comes from — a tense muscle, a tense wire. It is a verb too: you tense your shoulders, and you tense up when someone shouts. And there is a separate noun that learners meet in every grammar lesson — the past tense, the present tense — which shares the spelling and nothing else.
1adjectivetenseNervous and unable to relax.
“She was too tense to eat anything before the interview.”
synonyms: edgy, strained
2adjectivechargedCharged with anxiety, of a situation or moment.
“There was a tense pause while everyone waited for him to answer.”
3adjectivestretchedStretched tight.
“The wire was tense enough to hum in the wind.”
4verbmusclesTo make your muscles tight.
“He tensed as the dog came closer.”
5nounformThe form of a verb that shows when something happens.
“English builds the future tense with 'will' rather than with an ending.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: stressed
The grammar noun arrived from Old French tens, meaning time, which is the modern French temps, and behind that Latin tempus. So the past tense is really the past time. The same Latin word turns up in English as tempo.
Proto-Indo-European
*tend-
Latin
tempus
Old French
tens
Middle English
tens
English, today
tense
From Middle English tens, from Old French tens (modern French temps), from Latin tempus. a doublet of tempo and tempus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA