whiten.
(To cause) to become white or whiter; to bleach or blanch.
Meaning & usage
(To cause) to become white or whiter; to bleach or blanch.
Age had whitened his hair.
The trees in spring whiten with blossoms.
To increase the security of an iterated block cipher by steps that combine the data with portions of the key.
To normalize data so that the covariance matrix becomes the identity matrix; i.e., to remove correlations so each variable has unit variance.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English whitenen, whitnen, from Old Norse hvítna (“to whiten”), from Proto-Germanic *hwītnōną (“to whiten, become white”), from Proto-Indo-European *kwind-, *kwint- (“bright”), equivalent to white + -en. Cognate with Icelandic hvítna (“to whiten”), Swedish vitna, hvitna (“to whiten”), Danish hvidne (“to whiten”). Compare Old English hwītian (“to whiten, become white, be white, make white”).
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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.