soften someone up

Examples of softened

softened

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

He claimed that the conferees had softened the bill in all of these areas.
The mashed front fender and broken rear spring had softened everybody's concern for the automobile ' ' (153).
The micropylar endosperm of a seed was considered softened when it required a force of less than 1200 g to cause radicle protrusion.
Then your chest and diaphragm are suddenly opened and your mood is many times better; before long your muscles are softened and your eyelids close.
The proportion of seeds with a softened micropylar endosperm was evaluated by forcing radicle protrusion.
He had softened his attitude toward parties, and was supported by centre and centre-right parties.
The notion that children might help their parents in the mills softened, in public discourse, the brutality and exploitation that child labour entailed.
The micropylar endosperm was considered softened when radicle protrusion was induced by applying a force of 1200 g or less.
The inside looks inward and windows open into an interior world of multilayered, softened and blurred vistas.
They 'feed' each other and the character conflicts become softened or non-existent.
For dissection, experimental weevils were embedded ventral surface down in softened black wax in a shallow dish, and then covered with water.
The fire treatment softened the core and insured that the wood would not crack later.
Cutting a scene in which a king is banished from the final celebrations of the opera softened the impact of a potentially subversive political message.
The warm, sophisticated harmonic palette, dark textures and softened use of percussion go against this blueprint.
Apparently, for the micropylar endosperm to be sufficiently softened, an extensive degradation of the wall mannans was required.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.