tighten.
To make tighter.
Meaning & usage
To make tighter.
Please tighten that screw a quarter-turn.
To become tighter.
That joint is tightening as the wood dries.
To make money harder to borrow or obtain.
If the government doesn't tighten the money supply, inflation is certain to be harsh.
To raise short-term interest rates.
The Fed is expected to tighten by a quarter-point.
Where this word comes from
Synchronically equivalent to tight + -en, but actually derived from Middle English tighten, from Old English tyhtan, thus originally unrelated to tight (Old English *þiht).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.