[See -FOLD.]
A. adj. 1. Ten times as great or as much; ten times increased or intensified; also indefinitely, many times as great.
c. 1200. Trin. Coll. Hom., 135. His michelnesse was unhild on ten fold wise and mo.
1557. Recorde, Whetst., B ij. Decupla … 10 to 1: 20 to 2… Tennefolde.
1588. Shaks., Tit. A., III. ii. 6. Thy Neece and I … cannot passionate our tenfold griefe, With foulded Armes.
1625. N. Carpenter, Geog. Del., II. ix. (1635), 149. The Aire … being by a Tenne-fold proportion thinner then the Water.
1849. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., iii. I. 412. His mind reacted with tenfold force on the spirit of the age.
b. As predicate, passing into substantive use; cf. HUNDREDFOLD C.
1769. Home, Fatal Discov., IV. Euran! whate’er the lavish Pict has promis’d To tempt thee to betray thy master’s house, Tenfold I’ll give thee to preserve thy faith.
1832. Southey, Hist. Penins. War, III. xxxvii. 219. But the loss had been tenfold of what was there stated.
2. Ranged in ten folds, or ten deep. nonce-use.
1807. J. Barlow, Columb., I. 316. Stretch’d o’er the broad-back’d bills, in long array, The tenfold Alleganies meet the day.
B. adv. Ten times (in amount or degree).
1538. Elyot, Decuplo … if it be an aduerbe, it sygnifyeth tenne times, or tenne fold. Decuplum, like wyse.
1606. Shaks., Ant. & Cl., IV. vii. 15. I will reward thee Once for thy sprightly comfort, and ten-fold For thy good valour.
1667. Milton, P. L., II. 705. The grieslie terrour … So speaking and so threatning, grew ten fold More dreadful and deform.
1827. Syd. Smith, Wks. (1850), 485. Is not the Church of England tenfold more rich and more strong than when the separation took place?
1884. Tennyson, Becket, I. iii. False to himself, but ten-fold false to me!
Hence Tenfoldness, the condition or quality of being tenfold.
1875. W. D. Whitney, Are Languages Institutions? in Pop. Sci. Monthly, VII. June, 147. Once more, the child is made to count, and in the process his conceptions of number are cast into a decimal shape, one in which each higher factor is made up of ten of the next lower, till he comes to feel that such tenfoldness is a natural characteristic of enumeration.
1891. J. E. H. Thomson, Books which influenced our Lord, III. i. 382. There is no explanation of the tenfoldness exhibited in the symbols.
