tender#

tender adj Tender, compassionate, sympathetic, warm, warmhearted, responsive are comparable when they mean expressing or expressive of feeling that reveals affectionate interest in another especially in his joys, sorrows, or welfare.

Tender implies a sensitiveness to influences that awaken gentle emotions (as love, affection, pity, or kindliness) and often a capacity for expressing such emotions with a delicacy and gentleness that are especially grateful to the person concerned

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his mother was very tender with him .... she saw the effort it was costing— D. H. Lawrence

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the inflections of their voices, when they were talking to each other very privately, were often tender, and these sudden surprising tendernesses secretly thrilled both of them— Bennett

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Compassionate implies a temperament or a disposition that is either easily moved by the sufferings or hardships of another or is quick to show pity with tenderness or mercy

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not cold and blaming . . . but an older and wiser brother, very compassionate— Sinclair Lewis

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to wax compassionate over a bird, and remain hard as flint to a beast, is possible only to humanity— Repplier

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Sympathetic is a more comprehensive term than compassionate; it implies a temperament or a disposition that enables one to enter into the life of another and share his sorrows, his joys, his interests, his antipathies, and his ways of thinking and feeling and to give that other the impression that he is not alone or that he is being fairly and justly understood

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thus a tête-â-tête with a man of similar tastes, who is just and yet sympathetic, critical yet appreciative ... is a high intellectual pleasure— Benson

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though some considered her arrogant and forbidding, I found her personality sympathetic— Edmund Wilson

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Sympathetic is also applicable to attitudes or treatments that reveal a capacity for appraising or treating men and their experiences with great fairness and understanding

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a penetrating and profoundly sympathetic portrayal of the shifting, fluctuating impulses of a woman yielding both against and with her will— Lowes

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Warm implies a capacity for feeling and expressing love, affection, or interest with depth, ardor, or fervency; it suggests less softness of feeling or compassion than tender, but more heartiness, cordiality, or force

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a perfect gentleman, unaffected, warm, and obliging— Austen

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we common people are all one way or the other— warm or cold, passionate or frigid— Hardy

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a wave of genial friendliness flowed from the warm silly hearts of Britons towards the conquered foe— Rose Macaulay

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Warmhearted differs little from warm in meaning, but it usually carries a stronger implication of generosity, unselfishness, and, often, compassionateness

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she is warmhearted, impulsive, kind, and independent— Kaplan

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his portrait of the metropolis is warmhearted and accurate— Bracker

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Responsive differs from the preceding terms in usually suggesting sensitiveness to another's display of tenderness, compassion, sympathy, or warmth and a capacity for responding to that emotion; it stresses impressionableness and suggests a reaction, rather than a taking of the initiative

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rushed to Moscow as the new British ambassador in the hope of striking a more responsive chord among the Bolsheviks— Shirer

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she took up life, and became alert to the world again, responsive, like a ship in full sail, to every wind that blew— Rose Macaulay

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Analogous words: gentle, lenient, mild, *soft: humane, benevolent, *charitable, altruistic: *pitiful, piteous

Antonyms: callous: severe

tender vb *offer, proffer, present, prefer

Analogous words: propose, purpose, design (see INTEND): *suggest, intimate

tender n *overture, approach, advance, bid