[f. TENDER a. + -NESS.] The quality or state of being tender.
1. Physical softness or delicacy; fragility; inability to stand rough usage; weakness, frailty; † youthfulness (obs.); effeminacy, womanishness.
13[?]. Cursor M., 25337 (Cott.). Thoru tendernes of vr flexs.
1387. Trevisa, Higden (Rolls), VI. 301. Þou doost riȝtfulliche … þat confortest þe tendernesse [= newness] of my professioun.
c. 1430. Lydg., Min. Poems (Percy Soc.), 220. How myght I the woo endure, In tendrenesse of wommanheede?
1596. Dalrymple, trans. Leslie’s Hist. Scot. (S.T.S.), I. 19. In tendirnes of thair flesh thay [sheep] are lyke the cattel.
1623–33. Fletcher & Shirley, Night-Walker, I. iii. Alas poor gentlewoman, Must she become a nurse now in her tenderness?
1708. J. C., Compl. Collier (1845), 35. According to the tenderness or hardness of the Coal.
1774. Pennant, Tour Scotl. in 1772, 258. Through the age and tenderness of the parchment, little could be read.
1856. Ruskin, Mod. Paint., IV. V. xx. § 4. [Such a person] can hardly be said to know what tenderness in colour means at all.
b. quasi-concr. Tender substance.
1382. Wyclif, Jer. li. 34. He fulfilde his wombe with my tendernesse.
14[?]. Metr. Voc., in Wr.-Wülcker, 627/7. Thye, crus, hepe, femur, the tendurnesse of þe thye, famen.
1548. Thomas, Ital. Dict. (1567), Lanugine, the tendernesse or downe of a yonge bearde.
2. The quality of being tender in regard or treatment of others; gentleness, kindness, compassion, love; considerateness, mercy, leniency.
a. 1300. Cursor M., 9994 (Cott.). Takening … O tendernes and truth stedfast.
c. 1450. Merlin, i. 2. Grete loue he hadde to man and gret tendirnesse.
1526. Pilgr. Perf. (W. de W., 1531), 58 b. So longe as suche tendernes is to the no distraccion from goostlynes.
1668. Owen, Expos. Ps. cxxx. Wks. 1851, VI. 415. What love and tenderness there is in God to receive us.
1751. Johnson, Rambler, No. 179, ¶ 3. Deformity itself is regarded with tenderness rather than aversion.
1844. Ld. Brougham, Brit. Const., xix. § 5 (1862), 343. Who visited their offences with tenderness.
b. with a and pl. An instance of this.
1660. F. Brooke, trans. Le Blanc’s Trav., 284. Then there was amongst us such a tyde of tendernesses.
1850. Lynch, Theo. Trin., ix. 154. Hypocritical exhibitors of prettynesses and tendernesses.
3. Sensitiveness to impression; impressionableness, soft-heartedness; sensibility to pain, esp. when touched; crankness (of a ship).
c. 1440. Partonope, 2713. Som wept for tendyrnesse of hert.
1594. Carew, Huarte’s Exam. Wits, vi. (1596), 78. Memory is nothing els but a tendernesse of the braine, disposed … to receiue & preserue that which the imaginatiue apprehendeth.
1709. Stanhope, Paraphr., IV. 176. Till the Patient be awaken’d into Tenderness and Smart, there is no Hope of a Cure.
a. 1716. South, Serm. (J.). True tenderness of conscience is nothing else but an awful and exact sense of the rule which should direct it.
1781. Gibbon, Decl. & F., xxix. III. 113. The disgrace of his daughter … wounded the tenderness, or, at least, the pride, of Rufinus.
1843. R. J. Graves, Syst. Clin. Med., xviii. 210. Judging from the extreme epigastric and abdominal tenderness during life.
1854. Brewster, More Worlds, xvi. 231. Such a tenderness of retina, that he could, in a dark night, see and distinguish plainly colours of ribands.
1887. Daily Tel., 10 Sept., 2/5. She stood up well under her canvas. She showed no signs of tenderness.
