anneal
verb
[ əˈniːl ]
• heat (metal or glass) and allow it to cool slowly, in order to remove internal stresses and toughen it.
• "copper tubes must be annealed after bending or they will be brittle"
• recombine (DNA) in the double-stranded form.
Origin:
Old English onǣlan, from on + ǣlan ‘burn, bake’ from āl ‘fire, burning’. The original sense was ‘set on fire’, hence (in late Middle English) ‘subject to fire, alter by heating’.
