Word.ws English Dictionary

falling away

falling away is the present participle and gerund of fall away.

Meaning of fall away

Verb

fall away (third-person singular simple present falls away, present participle falling away, simple past fell away, past participle fallen away)

  1. (intransitive) To cease to support a person or cause.
    • After the divorce, all his friends fell away one by one.
  2. (intransitive) To diminish in size, weight, or intensity.
    • One colour falls away by just degrees, and another rises insensibly.1697, Joseph Addison, Essay on Virgil's Georgics
  3. (intransitive) To perish; to vanish; to be lost.
    • How […] can the soul […] fall away into nothing?1711 July 17 (Gregorian calendar), [Joseph Addison; Richard Steele et al.], “FRIDAY, July 7, 1711”, in The Spectator, number 111; republished in Alexander Chalmers, editor, The Spectator; a New...
  4. (intransitive) To slope downward.

Questions about falling away

What is falling away the present participle and gerund of?
Falling away is the present participle and gerund of fall away.

Words near falling away in the dictionary

  1. falling around
  2. falling asleep
  3. falling asleep in the Lord
  4. falling at the final hurdle
  5. falling at the last hurdle
  6. falling away
  7. falling back
  8. falling back into
  9. falling back on
  10. falling back upon
  11. falling behind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: falling away (page history and authors); fall away (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: “falling away.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/falling_away. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.