Steepen
verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To make steeper. transitive
"With a rare and beautiful ease one can now ring up a boffin, as I did the other day, and say: "As a price for not opposing our Parliamentary Powers for a new marshalling yard, the Council at X demands that the bridge over X Lane shall have 16 ft. 6 in. headroom. This means steepening our gradient from 1 in 70 to 1 in 65 for half a mile on a 20-chain curve. What difference will this make to the loads of Type "2", "3" and "4" diesels please?". Back comes the answer."
- 2 make steeper wordnet
- 3 To become steeper. intransitive
"H. Miller As the way steepened […] I could detect in the hollow of the hill some traces of the old path."
- 4 become steeper wordnet
Example
More examples"With a rare and beautiful ease one can now ring up a boffin, as I did the other day, and say: "As a price for not opposing our Parliamentary Powers for a new marshalling yard, the Council at X demands that the bridge over X Lane shall have 16 ft. 6 in. headroom. This means steepening our gradient from 1 in 70 to 1 in 65 for half a mile on a 20-chain curve. What difference will this make to the loads of Type "2", "3" and "4" diesels please?". Back comes the answer."
Etymology
From steep + -en. Compare Old English stīepan (“to steepen”).
More for "steepen"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.