Word.ws English Dictionary

alighting

alighting is the present participle and gerund of alight.

Meaning of alight

Verb

alight (third-person singular simple present alights, present participle alighting, simple past and past participle alighted or alit)

  1. (also, figuratively, obsolete, transitive) To make less heavy; to lighten; to alleviate, to relieve.
    Synonyms:
    alighten
  2. (intransitive) Often followed by from or off: to get off an animal which one has been riding; to dismount; to descend or exit from a vehicle; hence, to complete one's journey; to stop.
    • He alighted from his horse.
  3. (also, figuratively, intransitive) Often followed by at, on, or upon: of something aloft: to descend and settle; to land, to lodge, to rest.
    • A flying bird alights upon a tree.
  4. (archaic, intransitive) To come down or go down; to descend.
  5. (archaic, intransitive) Often followed by on or upon: of a blow, something thrown, etc.: to land heavily.
    • But ſtorms of Stones, from the proud Temple's height, / Pour down, and on our batter'd Helms alight.1697, Virgil, “The Second Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, page 251, lines...
  6. (figuratively, intransitive) Often followed by on or upon: to find by accident; to chance upon, to come upon.

See all 14 meanings of alight

Noun

alighting (plural alightings)

  1. The act of one who alights.
    • The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of...1958 June, J. R. R. Tolkien, From a letter to Forrest J. Ackerman (#210)
    • We compared the frequencies of alightings on hosts with those predicted from random transect data.1994, Leslie Real, Behavioral Mechanisms in Evolutionary Ecology, page 287

Forms of alighting

pluralalightings

Questions about alighting

What does alighting mean?
Alighting means the act of one who alights.
What is alighting the present participle and gerund of?
Alighting is the present participle and gerund of alight.
What part of speech is alighting?
Alighting is a noun.
What is the plural of alighting?
The plural of alighting is alightings.

Words near alighting in the dictionary

  1. alightened
  2. alightening
  3. alightens
  4. alightest
  5. alighteth
  6. alighting
  7. alightings
  8. alightment
  9. alightments
  10. alights
  11. align

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: alighting (page history and authors); alight (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “alighting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/alighting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.