Word.ws English Dictionary

ballooning

/bəˈluːnɪŋ/

ballooning adjective: growing rapidly as a balloon. Also the present participle and gerund of balloon.

Adjective

ballooning (not comparable)

  1. Growing rapidly as a balloon.
    • The ballooning economy was out of control.
  2. Rising high in the air.
    • The cricketer hit a ballooning shot for six runs.

Noun

ballooning (countable and uncountable, plural balloonings)

  1. The act of something that swells or expands.
    • This major artery from the heart to the lower body, the aorta, can indeed develop aneurysms. These balloonings of the shape of the normally straight artery may cause no bother, no symptoms and no complications.2013, Margaret McCartney, The Patient Paradox, page 95
  2. (uncountable) The sport or hobby of flying in a hot-air balloon.
    • When he retired, he took up ballooning.
    • Like most human activities, ballooning has sponsored heroes and hucksters and a good deal in between. For every dedicated scientist patiently recording atmospheric pressure and wind speed while shivering at high altitudes, there is a carnival barker with a bevy of pretty girls willing to dangle...2013 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36
  3. The mechanical kiting used by spiders, mites, caterpillars, etc. to travel through the air.

Also used as

ballooning is also the present participle and gerund of balloon.

Forms of ballooning

pluralballoonings

Words formed from ballooning

Questions about ballooning

What does ballooning mean?
Ballooning means growing rapidly as a balloon.
What part of speech is ballooning?
Ballooning can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce ballooning?
Ballooning is pronounced /bəˈluːnɪŋ/.

Words near ballooning in the dictionary

  1. balloonfuls
  2. balloonhead
  3. balloonheads
  4. balloonier
  5. ballooniest
  6. ballooning
  7. ballooningly
  8. balloonings
  9. balloonish
  10. balloonism
  11. balloonist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ballooning (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-ballooning.wav.

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