Whiten

//ˈ(h)waɪ̯.tən// name, verb

name, verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    (To cause) to become white or whiter; to bleach or blanch. ergative

    "Age had whitened his hair."

  2. 2
    turn white wordnet
  3. 3
    To increase the security of an iterated block cipher by steps that combine the data with portions of the key.
  4. 4
    To normalize data so that the covariance matrix becomes the identity matrix; i.e., to remove correlations so each variable has unit variance.
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A surname.

Synonyms

All synonyms
achromatizebesnowbewhitenblanchbleachbleach out

Example

More examples

"She was but thirty at the time of her death, and yet her hair had already begun to whiten."

Etymology

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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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.