amend

From Old French amender, from Latin ēmendō (“free from faults”), from ex (“from, out of”) + mendum (“fault”). Confer aphetic mend.

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /əˈmɛnd/
• Rhymes: -ɛnd

amend (third-person singular simple present amends, present participle amending, simple past and past participle amended)

1. (transitive) To make better.
   • 1594, William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece,

     Mud not the fountain that gave drink to thee;

     Mar not the thing that cannot be amended.

   • 1820, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Chapter 13,

     We shall cheer her sorrows, and amend her blood, by wedding her to a Norman.

   • 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 1, in The Celebrity:

     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.

2. (intransitive) To become better.
3. (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, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 216894069; The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd corrected and augmented edition, Oxford: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1624, OCLC 54573970, partition II, section 2, member 6, subsection 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.

4. (obsolete, intransitive) To be healed, to be cured, to recover (from an illness).
   • c. 1605, William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3,

     Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched souls

     That stay his cure: their malady convinces

     The great assay of art; but at his touch—

     Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand—

     They presently amend.

5. (transitive) To make a formal alteration (in legislation, a report, etc.) by adding, deleting, or rephrasing.
   • 1876, Henry Martyn Robert, Robert’s Rules of Order, Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Co., Article III, Section 23, p. 46,

     The following motions cannot be amended:

   • 1990, Doug Hoyle, Hansard, Trade Union Act, 1984, Amendment no. 2, 4 July, 1990,

     It is necessary to amend the Act to preserve the spirit in which it was first passed into law […]

• ameliorate
• correct
• improve
• See also Thesaurus:improve
• See also Thesaurus:repair

• amend in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• amend in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911

• Edman, Mande, Medan, ad-men, admen, deman, maned, named