temper vs wax

temper

noun
  • Milk of lime, or other substance, employed in the process formerly used to clarify sugar. 

  • Calmness of mind; moderation; equanimity; composure. 

  • The state of any compound substance which results from the mixture of various ingredients; due mixture of different qualities. 

  • The state of a metal or other substance, especially as to its hardness, produced by some process of heating or cooling. 

  • Middle state or course; mean; medium. 

  • A general tendency or orientation towards a certain type of mood, a volatile state; a habitual way of thinking, behaving or reacting. 

  • A tendency to become angry. 

  • The heat treatment to which a metal or other material has been subjected; a material that has undergone a particular heat treatment. 

  • State of mind; mood. 

  • Anger; a fit of anger. 

verb
  • To moderate or control. 

  • To adjust the temperature of an ingredient (e.g. eggs or chocolate) gradually so that it remains smooth and pleasing. 

  • To sauté spices in ghee or oil to release essential oils for flavouring a dish in South Asian cuisine. 

  • To adjust, as the mathematical scale to the actual scale, or to that in actual use. 

  • To mix clay, plaster or mortar with water to obtain the proper consistency. 

  • To strengthen or toughen a material, especially metal, by heat treatment; anneal. 

wax

noun
  • A thick syrup made by boiling down the sap of the sugar maple and then cooling it. 

  • Any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols or esters. 

  • Any preparation containing wax, used as a polish. 

  • Beeswax. 

  • The process of growing. 

  • Earwax. 

  • A type of drugs with as main ingredients weed oil and butane; hash oil. 

  • The phonograph record format for music. 

adj
  • Made of wax. 

verb
  • To defeat utterly. 

  • To move from low tide to high tide. 

  • To remove hair at the roots from (a part of the body) by coating the skin with a film of wax that is then pulled away sharply. 

  • To kill, especially to murder a person. 

  • To grow. 

  • To apply wax to (something, such as a shoe, a floor, a car, or an apple), usually to make it shiny. 

  • To increasingly assume the specified characteristic. 

  • To appear larger each night as a progression from a new moon to a full moon. 

How often have the words temper and wax occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )