intensifiern.

1835 New Monthly Mag. 43 293 There are many intensifiers, I say, to the passion of love; such as pride, jealousy, poetry.

1878 C. H. Spurgeon Treasury of David V. Ps. cvii. 4 Solitude is a great intensifier of misery.

1883 J. T. Taylor Hardwich's Man. Photogr. Chem. (ed. 9) 382 One of the oldest Collodion intensifiers.

1892 Lockwood's Dict. Mech. Engin. (ed. 2) 429 Intensifier, a device frequently employed in place of the hydraulic accumulator, for converting a low water pressure into a higher.

1915 E. H. Barton Introd. Mech. Fluids xii. 191 In connection with an hydraulic pressure system an intensifying accumulator or intensifier may be used. In this device a piston works in the low-pressure cylinder and a connected piston rod, or ram, in the high-pressure cylinder... The pressure is magnified in the ratio of the areas of ram and piston.

1915 E. H. Barton Introd. Mech. Fluids xii. 191 The intensifier presents an analogy to the hydraulic press.

1970 R. H. Warring Fluids for Power Syst. i. 17 Intensifiers are almost invariably used for the production of pressures over 50 000 psi.

1931 G. Stern Meaning & Change of Meaning 338 Intensifiers used ironically instead of down-toners. ‘A lot you know about that!’

1940 C. C. Fries Amer. Eng. Gram. 205 The pressure to add -ly to intensifiers modifying adjectives is especially strong in Standard English.

1951 W. Empson Struct. Complex Words i. 26 The modern feeling about quite is entirely different from that about a discredited intensifier (awfully, frightfully).

1964 Language 40 39 Intensifier is the name given here to a small class of modifiers, e.g. mere, utter.

1971 G. Ansre in J. Spencer Eng. Lang. W. Afr. 162 The word classes: adjective, quantifier, specifier, pluraliser and intensifier respectively.

1939 L. M. Myers Electron Optics viii. 449 The term amplifier, in contradistinction to converter, indicates an increase in intensity. With the same reasoning we might term the device an image intensifier. Perhaps the term intensifier may be the best of all. However, we shall employ the usually accepted term converter, because there does exist a conversion effect.

1959 Proc. IRE 47 907/2 Although the resolution obtainable is obviously much too low for military use, it is still of interest to the nuclear physicist as a simple and inexpensive intensifier for scintillation photography.