- nurse
- nurse vb Nurse, nurture, foster, cherish, cultivate are comparable especially when they mean to give the care neces-sary to the growth, development, or continued welfare or existence of someone or something.Nurse basically implies close care of and attention to someone (as an infant or a sick person) unable to care for himself with the idea of helping that one to grow strong and self-sufficient{
he was slowly nursed back to health
}In extended use the term implies similar sedulous attentions that feed or nourish and thereby strengthen what was at first weak, indefinite, or tentative{when I would muse in boyhood . . . and nurse resolves and fancies— Housman
}{we sat very quiet, not speaking at all, each nursing his own fears and excitements— Dahl
}{they sulkily avoid his eye, and nurse their wrath in silence— Shaw
}Nurture stresses the rearing and training, and so the determination of the course the person, or by extension the thing, will follow{by solemn vision, and bright silver dream, his infancy was nurtured— Shelley
}{reverence for age and authority, even for law, has disappeared; and in the train of these have gone the virtues they engendered and nurtured— Dickinson
}Foster implies encouragement or promotion of the growth or increase of something{age, I find, fosters the finer feelings— L. P. Smith
}{every- thing . . . had fostered in the princess a like conviction— Henry James
}{the teaching that fosters these ends succeeds; the teaching which neglects them fails— Suzzallo
}{governments have deliberately fostered nationalistic fervor to serve their own political purposes— Huxley
}Cherish stresses loving, protective care (as of a nurse or a parent for a child, or of a husband for a wife){to love and to cherish, till death do us part— Anglican Marriage Service: Book of Common Prayer
}In its extended use it is not always distinguishable from nurse, but it may retain its implications of holding dear or as a thing of value, and stress prizing and preserving rather than brooding over or causing to increase in strength{tablecloths and napkins . . . washed and ironed again and again, mended and cherished— Shirley Jackson
}{from the first, separately and together, she and I had cherished ideals of freedom and independence . . . and cast contempt on the narrow self- absorption of domestic love— Ellis
}{Julius was a bold iconoclast about republican forms which had survived their usefulness; Augustus sought to cherish whatever of these forms could be made to work— Buchan
}Cultivate basically implies the care and attention given to land in order to increase its fertility or to plants in order to improve their condition. In its extended use it implies comparable and equally sedulous attentions to the improvement or growth of some usually desirable thing{his sense of personal initiative is cultivated instead of being diminished— Russell
}{we shall do well to foster the studies most conducive to the habits we wish to cultivate— Grandgent
}{bred to patience—a barmaid since age thirteen—she had cultivated and perfected a vast cowlike calm which served her now in good stead— Pynchon
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
