bleaching
/ˈbliːt͡ʃɪŋ/
bleaching is the present participle and gerund of bleach.
Noun
bleaching (countable and uncountable, plural bleachings)
- The process of removing stains or of whitening fabrics, especially by the use of chemical agents.
- The loss or removal of part of the (semantic, grammatical, etc) content or a word or morpheme.
- Grammaticalization is often associated with 'semantic bleaching', and this 'bleaching' is the result of reanalysis […] But there is no evidence that the bleaching of the meaning of do played any role in the causation of this sequence of events.2000, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Language Form and Language Function, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 249
- In the development of the prepositional phrase, which did not exist in PIE, one can see a grammaticalization based on a double bleaching. […] Many of these combinations are achieved by lexical bleaching of the grammatical element and grammatical bleaching of the lexical element, as in the...2009, Vit Bubenik, John Hewson, Sarah Rose, Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages: Papers presented at the workshop on Indo-European Linguistics at the XVIIIth International Conference on...
Meaning of bleach
Verb
bleach (third-person singular simple present bleaches, present participle bleaching, simple past and past participle bleached)
- To treat with bleach, especially so as to whiten (fabric, paper, etc.) or lighten (hair).
- Candifacio, to make whyte, to bleache, to make to glowe lyke a burnyng cole.1538, Thomas Elyot, The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght, London: Thomas Berthelet
- Synonyms:
- whitewash
- To be whitened or lightened (by the sun, for example).
- The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!c. 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Winters Tale”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
- The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
- To lose color due to stress-induced expulsion of symbiotic unicellular algae.
- Once coral bleaching begins, corals tend to continue to bleach even if the stressor is removed.
- To make meaningless; to divest of meaning; to make empty.
- semantically bleached words that have become illocutionary particles
Forms of bleaching
| plural | bleachings |
|---|
Words formed from bleaching
Phrases with bleaching
Words that rhyme with bleaching
Questions about bleaching
- What does bleaching mean?
- Bleaching means the process of removing stains or of whitening fabrics, especially by the use of chemical agents.
- What is bleaching the present participle and gerund of?
- Bleaching is the present participle and gerund of bleach.
- What part of speech is bleaching?
- Bleaching is a noun.
- How do you pronounce bleaching?
- Bleaching is pronounced /ˈbliːt͡ʃɪŋ/.
- What is the plural of bleaching?
- The plural of bleaching is bleachings.
Words near bleaching in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bleaching (page history and authors); bleach (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)-Vealhurl-bleaching.wav.
Cite this entry: “bleaching.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bleaching. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.