relieve
relieve (rĭ-lēvʹ) verb, transitive
relieved, relieving, relieves
1. To cause a lessening or alleviation of: relieved all his symptoms; relieved the tension.
2. To free from pain, anxiety, or distress.
3. To furnish assistance or aid to.
4. To rescue from siege.
5. To release (a person) from an obligation, a restriction, or a burden, as by law or legislation.
6. To free from a specified duty by providing or acting as a substitute.
7. To make less tedious, monotonous, or unpleasant: Only one small candle relieved the gloom.
8. To make prominent or effective by contrast; set off.
9. Informal. To rob or deprive: Pickpockets relieved him of his money.
idiom.
relieve oneself
To urinate or defecate.
[Middle English releven, from Old French relever, from Latin relevāre : re-, re- + levāre, to raise.]
relievʹable adjective
relievʹer noun
Synonyms: relieve, allay, alleviate, assuage, lighten, mitigate, palliate. All of these verbs mean to make something less severe or more bearable. To relieve is to ease and make more endurable something causing discomfort or distress: "that misery which he strives in vain to relieve" (Henry David Thoreau). "The counselor relieved her fears" (Sir Walter Scott). Allay suggests relief at least for the time being from what is burdensome or painful: "This music crept by me upon the waters,/Allaying both their fury and my passion/With its sweet air" (Shakespeare). Alleviate connotes temporary lessening of distress without removal of its cause: "No arguments shall be wanting on my part that can alleviate so severe a misfortune" (Jane Austen). To assuage is to soothe or make milder: "What shall assuage the unforgotten pain/And teach the unforgetful to forget?" (Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Lighten in this comparison signifies to make less heavy or oppressive: Congress endeavored to lighten the taxpayers' burden. Mitigate and palliate connote moderating the severity, force, or intensity of something that causes suffering: "I . . . prayed to the Lord to mitigate a calamity which seemed to me past the capacity of man to remedy" (John Galt). "His well-known financial ability made men turn to him in the hour of distress, as of all statesmen the most fitted to palliate it" (William E.H. Lecky).