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up vote 6 down vote favorite

I have seen people use heart-rendering. Is there a usage like that? Is it used wrongly for heartrending?

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2  
Thank you for providing that link! It was very helpful. It made your question much more meaningful. (And gave a possible reason that "heart-rendering" wasn't merely due to a spelling mistake.) – Feral Oink Dec 31 '11 at 5:15

4 Answers

up vote 18 down vote

Yes, if you are a butcher or soap maker and commonly boil offal.

Otherwise it's heartrending.

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Is there a badge for wit? If so, you should get it. In its absence you get my vote. – RandomIdeaEnglish Dec 31 '11 at 11:04
haha! +1 for neatly encapsulating those obscure contexts where heart-rendering might occur! – FumbleFingers Dec 31 '11 at 14:38
Although as jay says - it might also be commonly used at Pixar – mgb Dec 31 '11 at 19:29
Perhaps we could also ask if the spelling may have been used in 1861 (when the correspondent in the quotation wrote it). – GEdgar May 6 at 17:44
up vote 8 down vote

I strongly suspect it is just a mis-spelling of "heart-rending".

In computers, to "render" something is to draw it on a screen or printer, as in "rendering an image". So "heart-rendering" would, I guess, mean to draw a picture of a heart on the screen. :-)

In general, to "render" is to give or present something, like to "render a bill", meaning to give someone your bill for payment. It's barely possible that someone said "heart rendering" meaning "to give someone your heart", i.e. offer love or friendship. But I doubt it, unless they were making a play on words with "heart-rending". As I say, it's probably just a mistake.

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Makes sense. That site where it was misused appeared to be a serious one and made me suspect such a usage. – nemoy Dec 31 '11 at 5:04
It is a serious site. I thought so too. I don't think heart-rendering makes sense in a modern context at all. But I don't think that author and the website deliberately made a spelling error. Twice. Particularly since everything else was correct in the article. It was an odd choice of title though. I'm not sure why there would be such implied emphasis on "heart-rendering". I mean, the article itself was really sad, serious. – Feral Oink Dec 31 '11 at 21:43
up vote 7 down vote

The correct modern usage is heart-rending. Rend means to tear. Heart-rending is similar to heart-breaking, an emotional reaction to a very sad event.

You referred to heart-rendering as it appears in an article, December 1861: A heart-rendering scene, written by Dr. Terry L. Jones, a professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. It is one of a series of articles about the U.S. Civil War. The only use of "heart-rendering" was a direct historical quote from a witness to the 1861 execution (which was then used for the title) in Dr. Jones' article:

"It was heart-rendering," a correspondent wrote, "to see the poor brother's agony."

To render in modern contexts would be:

  • In computer graphics, rendering an image
  • In cooking, to render fat, the action of rendering fat

EDIT: For example

It was a bad collision, rendering the auto useless.

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1  
.. And in the sense of "cause to be". "The fault rendered the car useless". – slim Dec 31 '11 at 5:13
Thanks @slim I just edited my answer to include your suggestion. – Feral Oink Dec 31 '11 at 5:32
up vote 2 down vote

You could use it. Whether it has ever actually been used is another question entirely.

The meaning of "to render" has been accurately described in the other answers. "To rend" means to rip in two, so "heartrending" is pretty much synonymous with "heartbreaking".

So the quote you gave is probably just a mistake on the correspondent's part (if I may be so bold as to say so), and he meant to say "heart-rending", that is, that it broke his heart to see such agony.

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