Annealing

n. process of tempering (by heating and cooling)

v. toughen, temper (by heating and cooling)

Annealing may refer to:Annealing (metallurgy), a heat treatment that alters the microstructure of a material causing changes in properties such as strength and hardnessAnnealing (glass), heating a piece of glass to remove stressAnnealing (biology), DNA or RNA pairing by hydrogen bonds to a complementary sequence, forming a double-stranded polynucleotideSimulated annealing, a technique for searching for a solution in a space otherwise too large for "ordinary" search methods to yield resultsInformation annealing or knowledge annealing, a network-based information system in which all users of the system are permitted to change the system at willQuantum annealing, a method for finding solutions to combinatorial optimisation problems and ground states of glassy systems using quantum fluctuations
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Noun
1. hardening something by heat treatment
(synonym) tempering
(hypernym) hardening

Verb
1. toughen (steel or glass) by a process of gradually heating and cooling; "temper glass"
(synonym) temper, normalize
(hypernym) toughen

(p. pr. & vb. n.)
of Anneal
  

(n.)
The process used to render glass, iron, etc., less brittle, performed by allowing them to cool very gradually from a high heat.
  

(n.)
The burning of metallic colors into glass, earthenware, etc.
  

simulated annealing