quicken

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He felt his pulses quicken, and his heart beat fast.

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Definitions (29)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (7)

  1. transitive verb To make more rapid; accelerate.
  2. transitive verb To make alive; vitalize.
  3. transitive verb To excite and stimulate; stir: Such stories quicken the imagination.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (15)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (2)

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (5)

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Examples (50)

  • Felt his body quicken, the thick ruff of fur between his shoulder blades rise up Female. —  SexyBeastII
  • Adelia in turn saw her mother's eyes brighten and her breath quicken, and finally she dared believe the Maker had been right. —  FSF,January2006
  • And Taiwan can help solidify, quicken, and smooth that process. —  Foreign Policy In Focus
  • The intellectual sense seems to quicken, as if through transparent fleshly gauze that expectant soul lay open to 'prick of light.' —  Oswald Langdon or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898
  • I wanted to study out why it was that toward the end of our ride together, whenever Mrs. Fulton spoke to me or looked back at me over her shoulder, my pulses seemed to quicken--and my breathing V We were at the beginning of those parlous times when the Democrats, having come into power upon a wave of impassioned idiocy and jealousy, were beginning to make us poor at home and despised abroad. —  We Three
 

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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same contextWord Family

quicken:   quickened ·  quickening
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (2)

  1. from late Middle English quykenen; from quick + -en.
  2. from quick + -en, used indefinitely. Cf. quick-grass and quitch.
 

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/ˈkwɪkn/
by American Heritage

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