from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. The extinction of any of several physical properties.
- n. The rapid cooling of a hot metal object, by placing it in a liquid, in order to harden it.
- v. Present participle of quench.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The act of extinguishing; also, the state of being extinguished.
- n. In metallurgy, a method of producing a hard crust on molten metal for convenience in removing it in small plates or disks, called sometimes rosettes, instead of allowing it to solidify in one mass. See rosette.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. the act of extinguishing; causing to stop burning
a deep thirst for knowledge which I hope to begin quenching next year at the
Severstal engineers said the new line at its Dearborn, Mich., plant, which supplies Ford Motor Co. and other car makers, relies on a secret continuous-annealing formula that involves cooling steel with water—a process known as quenching—and then immediately reheating it.
Well ... as everyone who knows the properties of metals will tell you, heating a metal up (in this case potassium), then as quickly as possible cooling it down (this is called quenching), makes the metal form tiny crystals, and tiny is what we want.
The beast of prey skulking back to his lair, the stag quenching his thirst ere retiring to the depths of the forest, the wedge of wild fowl flying with trumpet notes to some distant lake, the vulture hastening in heavy flight to the carrion that night has provided, the crane flapping to the shallows, and the jackal shuffling along to his shelter in the nullah, have each and all their portent to the initiated eye.
The transfer of the initially absorbed energy to other nonabsorbing molecules, called "quenching" in photochemistry, enables a relatively small amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2 to continuously absorb the thermoradiative energy, which otherwise would escape into space, and to convert the radiation back to thermal energy that stays on Earth.
The old Virginia Inn at the cross roads claims to be the actual scene of the "quenching" of Sir Walter Raleigh.
It's not that different in theory from "quenching" metal after it's been tempered / hardened.
But through an innovative use of a laboratory tool called a quench-flow machine-a machine that allows for extreme precision in the stopping, or "quenching," of a reaction-the team was able to look at what was going on over intervals of just 10 milliseconds in both yeast and human proteins.
After shopping, thirst inevitably opened our eyes toward quenching this thirst and fervor for something cool.
In Game of Thrones' debut, viewers met King Robert Barantheon, a laid-back monarch who seems more interested in wenching and quenching various appetites than in ruling the Seven Kingdoms.