quench
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /kwɛnt͡ʃ/
rhymes: -ɛntʃ
Forms: form: quenches
form: quenching
form: quenched
form: quenched
form: quent
Etymology: From Middle English quenchen, from Old English cwenċan, from Proto-Germanic *kwankijaną.
Senses: examples: text: The library quenched her thirst for knowledge.
text: The wearie Traueiler, wandring that way, / Therein did often quench his thriſty heat, / And then by it his wearie limbes diſplay, / Whiles creeping ſlomber made him to forget[…]
ref: 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 254:
text: I began also to feel very hungry, as not having eaten for twenty-four hours; and worse than that, there was a parching thirst and dryness in my throat, and nothing with which to quench it.
ref: [1898], J[ohn] Meade Falkner, Moonfleet, London; Toronto, Ont.: Jonathan Cape, published 1934, →OCLC:
synonyms: appease
slake
glosses: To satisfy, especially a literal or figurative thirst.
examples: text: […] others ſaying, the fire would ceaſe as ſoon as it had vent, uncovered a great part of the houſe, breaking down the roofs, and destroying all that ſtood in their way. None of them went about to quench the fire, but all were employed in pulling down the houſe, […]
ref: 1798, Francisco de Quevedo, anonymous translator, Fortune in Her Wits, and the Hour of All Men, volume 3, Edinburgh, translation of La fortuna con seso, y La hora de todos (in Spanish), pages 130–131:
text: “From here you will see which one of us two stands up...when the fiery vomit is quenched.”
ref: 1961, Norma Lorre Goodrich, “Beowulf”, in The Medieval Myths, New York: The New American Library, page 44:
glosses: To extinguish or put out (as a fire or light).
examples: text: The swordsmith quenched the sword in an oil bath so that it wouldn't shatter.
topics: engineering
metallurgy
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
glosses: To cool rapidly by direct contact with liquid coolant, as a blacksmith quenching hot iron.
topics: chemistry
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
glosses: To terminate or greatly diminish (a chemical reaction) by destroying or deforming the remaining reagents.
examples: text: A suitable method to prepare a system out of equilibrium in order to study the ensuing dynamics is to quench the system, i.e., to change its parameters abruptly.
ref: 2018, P. Bleicker and G. S. Uhrig, “Strong quenches in the one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model”, in Physical Review A, volume 98, →DOI, page 1:
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
glosses: To rapidly change the parameters of a physical system.
examples: text: If someone is pinned against the MRI magnet by a ferromagnetic object, you may need to quench the magnet in order to free them.
text: These knobs are generally mounted behind a cover of some sort, to prevent someone from leaning up against them or putting a philodendron on top of them, because (1) that aforementioned geyser can represent thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of helium these days, and (2) quenching is Not Good for the integrity of the magnet, and in the worse^([sic]) case you might find yourself with a lot of high-quality scrap metal.
ref: 2015 May 15, Derek Lowe, “Quenching NMRs, Accidentally and On Purpose”, in In the Pipeline, archived from the original on 20 Nov 2022:
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
glosses: To rapidly terminate the operation of a superconducting electromagnet by causing part or all of the magnet's windings to enter the normal, resistive state.
Derived terms: quenchcoal