- 1變濃稠、變厚、勾芡（煮菜時最常用）。做及物動詞時就是「把…弄稠」，不及物就是「（自己）變稠」。
To become thick, or to make something thick. It works both ways with no change in form: the sauce thickens (it does it by itself) and you thicken the sauce (you do it to something). Most often it is about liquids getting less runny — cooking is the home ground of this word: Stir until the gravy thickens; Thicken the soup with a little . It also covers things getting denser or wider generally: fog thickening over the road, a forest thickening as you walk deeper in, hair thickening, a tree trunk thickening over the years. Then there is a well-worn idiom worth knowing: the plot thickens, said when a situation gets more or more mysterious — often half-jokingly, when a small everyday puzzle takes a strange turn. Register is completely ordinary; you will meet it in recipes, in weather reports, and in novels describing a landscape. The one thing it does not usually mean is a person putting on weight — for that English says "put on weight" or, more literally and rather , "thicken around the middle."
組成thick + -en. The ending -en turns a describing word into a doing word meaning "become that, or make something that" — a small, very productive piece of English. The word itself came into English in the medieval period, possibly influenced by Old Norse þykkna ("to thicken"), which is the same word in a cousin language.
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
thickenverb/ˈθɪkən/
- 1
To make thicker (in the sense of wider).
- 2
To make thicker (in the sense of more viscous).
- to thicken a sauce
- 3
To become thicker (in the sense of wider).
- As we age, the major arteries of our bodies frequently become thickened with plaque, a fatty material with an oatmeal-like consistency that builds up along the inner lining of blood vessels. The reason plaque forms isn’t entirely known, but it seems to be related to high levels of cholesterol inducing an inflammatory response, which can also attract and trap more cellular debris over time.
- 4
To become thicker (in the sense of more viscous).
- 5
To strengthen; to confirm.
- And this may helpe to thicken other proofes,/ That do demonstrate thinly.
- 6
To make more frequent.
- to thicken blows
- 7
literaryTo make more detailed or comprehensive.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。