Amend
Pronunciation
- UK IPA: /əˈmɛnd/
- Rhymes: -ɛnd
Origin
From Old French amender, from Latin Ä“mendÅ ("free from faults"), from ex ("from, out of") + mendum ("fault"). Confer aphetic mend.
Full definition of amend
Verb
- (transitive) To make better.
- 1898, Winston Churchill, The Celebrity Chapter 1, I was about to say that I had known the Celebrity from the time he wore kilts. But I see I will have to amend that, because he was not a celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after I left New York for the West.
- ShakespeareMar not the thing that cannot be amended.
- Sir Walter ScottWe shall cheer her sorrows, and amend her blood, by wedding her to a Norman.
- (intransitive) To become better.
- (obsolete, transitive) To heal (someone sick); to cure (a disease etc.).
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.x:But Paridell complaynd, that his late fight
With Britomart, so sore did him offend,
That ryde he could not, till his hurts he did amend. - 1621, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, II.2.6.ii:he gave her a vomit, and conveyed a serpent, such as she conceived, into the basin; upon the sight of it she was amended.
- (transitive) To make a formal alteration in legislation by adding, deleting, or rephrasing.