0 past simple and past participle of massage
1 to rub and press someone's body with regular repeated movements, in order to relax them or to reduce stiffness or pain in the joints (= places where two bones are connected) or muscles:
Would you massage my shoulders?
2 to try to make facts or numbers appear better than they really are in order to deceive someone:
When we observed the participants' behavior during the experiments, they pressed and massaged the real specimen with their finger.
The swabs were then massaged by hand or in a stomacher bag for 2 min if the latter equipment was available at the slaughterhouse.
The eye was massaged to lower the intraocular pressure before injection.
It was only when the floor planes were activated, massaged with vibratory pulsation, that the site suddenly became alive, resonating both the structure and the viewers with sympathetic harmonics.
But the political tensions in the process, and the potential conflict these give rise to, cannot be massaged away: more effective management cannot solve problems in the political domain.
Water with some detergent was added to the bag and the contents were thoroughly massaged.
Similarly, head nouns with the known deverbal suffixes (such as -ant, -ee, -er, -or, -age, -al, -ation, -tion, -sion, -ing, -ment, etc.) could be massaged into likely verbal forms.
It might have massaged our egos more agreeably, if things had taken that course.
