This word was first used by S T Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817): ‘the will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever’. Coleridge added a footnote to justify his coinage, asserting that the earlier use of intend in this sense had become confusingly ambiguous, and that the periphrastic render intense would ruin the beautiful harmony of his sentence, although he admits that the new word sounds ‘uncouth to my own ear’. The word was well established by the middle of the 19th cent