Soften

1. v. i. To become soft or softened, or less rude, harsh, severe, or obdurate.
2. v. t. To make soft or more soft.
3. v. t. To render less hard; — said of matter.
4. v. t. To mollify; to make less fierce or intractable.
5. v. t. To palliate; to represent as less enormous; as, to soften a fault.
6. v. t. To compose; to mitigate; to assuage.
7. v. t. To make less harsh, less rude, less offensive, or less violent, or to render of an opposite quality.
8. v. t. To make less glaring; to tone down; as, to soften the coloring of a picture.
9. v. t. To make tender; to make effeminate; to enervate; as, troops softened by luxury.
10. v. t. To make less harsh or grating, or of a quality the opposite; as, to soften the voice.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.