from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- transitive v. To make or become taut.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- v. To make taut.
- v. To become taut.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To become taut or tense.
- To make taut, tense, or tight; tighten; stiffen.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- v. make taut or tauter
- v. become taut or tauter
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Then, the legs tauten, the balance shifts into the balls of the feet, the torso seems to lengthen, and suddenly someone has a leg against her ear.
As she listened I could see the fear tauten her face.
He felt his stale melancholia leave him, his head become clearer, his nerves tauten.
Every nerve in his body seemed to tauten: He pulled out his wand, moved into the shadows beside the decapitated elf heads, and waited.
There was no breeze, and as the clumsy ship rolled and lurched on the heaving sea, her idle sails flapped against her masts with a regularly recurring noise, and her bowsprit would seem to rise higher with the water's swell, to dip again with a jerk that made each rope tremble and tauten.
Something seemed to tauten in her face, but she said, 'Oh, it was all right, you know ...'
We saw thin black threads of wire tauten, snap, and fall, the ends flying, and the ladder top burst through.
As he heard the agony in her voice Jake felt his scalp tauten and muscles tense.
Couldn't beat the tough Para training regime to work the flab off, tauten muscle tone, get the old heart-and-lung machine functioning.
Lucky Garrett got to do it with no one to tauten the rope.