tender [ME] In the senses ‘gentle and kind’ and ‘sensitive to pain or damage’, tender goes back to Latin tener ‘delicate’. It appears in a number of phrases relating to feeling for others. Tender loving care goes back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3: ‘Go, Salisbury, and tell them all from me / I thank them for their tender loving care.’ Its abbreviation TLC is comparatively modern, dating from the 1940s. The phrase tender mercies [M16th] was probably originally a biblical allusion to a verse in the Book of Proverbs: ‘The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.’ The tender [M16th] in ‘an invitation to tender’ is a different word that was originally a legal term meaning ‘to formally offer a plea, evidence or the money to discharge a debt’. It comes ultimately from Latin tendere ‘to stretch, hold out’, also the source of tend [ME], first found in the sense ‘move or be inclined to move in a certain direction’.