Home / Words / amplifyNo. 0024

amplify

/ˈæmplɪfaɪ//ˈæmplɪfaɪ/·verb
to increase the strength, volume, or intensity of something
Fig. 1 — A speaker no bigger than a thumbnail lets out a whisper, the kind of sound a room swallows without noticing.
01Definition

To amplify is to make larger or louder — to boost a signal until it dominates. From the Latin amplus, 'wide, abundant', it began as 'to enlarge' and now lives mostly in sound and influence: an amplifier swells a whisper into a roar; social media can amplify a rumor until it drowns out the truth. The word implies magnification of something already present, not creation from nothing. It is the active opposite of suppress, and can quietly turn a ripple into a surge.

02In use
  • iThe microphone amplifies her voice so the whole hall can hear.
  • iiRepeating a claim online can amplify it far beyond its original audience.
  • iiiPoor insulation amplifies the noise from the street below.
03Collocations
  • amplify a signal
  • amplify the effect
  • greatly amplify
  • amplify concerns

Family amplification (noun) · amplifier (noun)

04Relations

=magnify, intensify, boost, heighten, strengthen

≠suppress, dampen, diminish

05Compared
PairThe difference
amplify vs diminishmakes a thing greater → amplify; makes it less → diminish.
amplify vs magnifystrength, volume, or reach genuinely increased → amplify; apparent size increased, or importance exaggerated → magnify.
06TOEFL & IELTS

TOEFL physics and biology lectures use 'amplify' literally (amplifying sound, signals, or genetic material), while social-science passages use it figuratively — media that 'amplify' a message. In IELTS Writing, 'this only amplifies the problem' is a strong cause-and-effect verb. The noun 'amplification' is common in academic English. Contrast it with 'suppress' and 'dampen'.

07Asked
What does it mean to amplify a voice?
Literally, to make it louder through equipment; figuratively — the sense that dominates current usage — to give a perspective more reach than it could get alone: 'the campaign amplified local residents' voices'. The figurative idiom keeps the word's honest limit: amplifying adds volume and reach to something already being said, never the message itself.
What does amplify mean in biology?
To multiply copies of a DNA segment until there is enough to study — the job of PCR, which can turn a single fragment into millions of copies in hours. Geneticists also speak of gene amplification inside cells, where a stretch of the genome is duplicated many times over. Same verb, same logic: more of what was already there.
What does an amplifier actually do?
It takes a weak electrical signal — a guitar pickup's faint wobble, a microphone's murmur — and uses external power to redraw it larger, so the same shape drives a loudspeaker. The scene above is the acoustic ancestor: a whisper enters the pinched end of a horn and leaves as a wall of sound, nothing added but size.
What is the difference between amplification and an amplifier?
Process versus device. Amplification is the act or result of boosting ('the amplification of the signal'; rhetoricians even use it for expanding a point). An amplifier is the box that does it. Academic writing needs the first; the music shop sells the second — 'amp', its clipped form, now outruns the full word in speech.
What is the difference between amplify and magnify?
Both enlarge, but along different axes: magnify enlarges appearance — a lens magnifies what you see; amplify enlarges strength — sound, signals, effects, emotions. A microscope magnifies a cell; a speaker amplifies a whisper. Figuratively the border blurs ('magnified/amplified the crisis'), but the physical senses never swap.
What is the opposite of amplify?
In everyday use, dampen, muffle or suppress — each cuts a signal's strength rather than its source. The site's own antonym pairing is diminish, and that full contrast, growth against shrinkage in two side-by-side scenes, lives on the amplify vs diminish page linked in the 'Compared' list above.