These words all share the meaning of looking after or taking care of someone or something. Nurse is specifically applied to looking after the sick, injured or infirm: His wife patiently nursed him back to health after his heart attack. In this sense it implies intimate care and close, devoted supervision, although it may also refer to a more formal and professional relationship, as that between a trained nurse and patient. Tend may imply devoted concern, but it is a concern based more upon one’s sense of duty, charity or religious conviction than upon one’s personal feeling for the individual being helped.

• It is the duty of physicians to tend the sick; The doctor selflessly tended (or, more informally, tended to ) the wounded soldiers before dressing his own wound.

Tend may also apply to things, thus emphasizing its essentially impersonal connotation: to tend machinery; to tend a boiler.

Minister is close in meaning to tend and nurse , but today it often sounds somewhat rhetorical or stuffy when applied exclusively to the care of the sick. It is more often applied nowadays to general wants, especially to spiritual succour, and even in such contexts it is a more formal word than tend or nurse .

• An elected representative must minister to the needs and aspirations of his own community, city and nation; As a doctor ministers to the body, so does a clergyman minister to the spirit or soul.

Care for is the most general term of this group. In the sense here considered, it can mean looking after all the needs of a child, tending an invalid, nursing a convalescent back to health, or ministering to the unwell: The foster mother cared for those boys as faithfully as if they had been her own sons.

In the sense being compared here, mind means to look after, watch over or take care of. It most often suggests a temporary charge rather than a permanent devotion: to mind someone’s children; to mind sheep; to mind a store while the owner is at lunch.