Is heart-rendering correct?

I have seen people use heart-rendering.

The concern was unwarranted, however, for the company commander ordered, "Ready! Aim! Fire!" and a dozen muskets split the crisp December air with a thunderous volley. In the hushed silence that followed, a lone Tiger broke ranks, ran up to one body, and gently held and caressed it. "It was heart-rendering," a correspondent wrote, "to see the poor brother's agony." Wheat, the only many in the division who was excused from attending the execution, broke down and cried in his tent at hearing the discharge of muskets. [The News-Star (Monroe, Louisiana), December 23, 2011, page 28]

Is there a usage like that? Is it used wrongly for heartrending?

Solution 1:

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

Otherwise it's heartrending.

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

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.

Solution 4:

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.