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say it: tens
tense is a verb, adjective and noun meaning "become stretched or tense or taut". It is pronounced /ˈtɛns/ — tens. It carries 8 recorded senses.
increase the tension on
“alternately relax and tense your calf muscle”
“tense the rope manually before tensing the spring”
become tense, nervous, or uneasy
“He tensed up when he saw his opponent enter the room”
pronounced with relatively tense tongue muscles (e.g., the vowel sound in `beat')
phonetics
a grammatical category of verbs used to express distinctions of time
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for tense come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.