flaring
flaring adjective: having a tendency of streaming, flapping, or spreading broadly as if within a current of air or in outer space. Also the present participle and gerund of flare.
Adjective
flaring (comparative more flaring, superlative most flaring)
- Having a tendency of streaming, flapping, or spreading broadly as if within a current of air or in outer space.
- This consists in a waving motion backward and forward, sometimes like a fan, sometimes like a long scroll flying in the wind, over which flaring waves chase each other with such velocity that the eye refuses to follow their trembling flight. It is, no doubt, this characteristic of sudden and...1878, Victoria University, Acta Victoriana, Victoria University, page 362
- “Little of this faulty book of mine was composed in the closet,” he explains; “it was gathered by my own eyes and ears, concocted in my own slender intellect while at my rural employment, and wrote down on scraps of paper as I found it convenient in the midst of the works of nature, in the open...1933, Morton Henry Vollam, In Scotland Again, Dodd, Mead & Company, pages 78-79
Noun
flaring (countable and uncountable, plural flarings)
- The act of something that flares.
- […] those shootings of stars, eclipses of the moon, howlings of dogs, and flarings of candles, carefully noted and interpreted by the oracular sibyls […]1809, Diedrich Knickerbocker [pseudonym; Washington Irving], A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), New...
- Now the moon illumined them with bluish gleams, and anon the fires of aurora borealis seemed to cover them with the flarings of a great conflagration.1821, The North American Review, Volume XIII, Oliver Everett, page 207
- The deliberate open-air burning of natural gas that is generated as a by-product of various petrochemical processes, especially oil extraction; gas flaring.
- Separate research suggests a switch from the flaring of methane to venting may be behind some of these vast outpourings. Flaring is used to burn unwanted gas, putting CO₂ into the atmosphere, but is easy to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon in recent years.2023 May 9, Damian Carrington, “‘Mind-boggling’ methane emissions from Turkmenistan revealed”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
Also used as
flaring is also the present participle and gerund of flare.
Examples of flaring in a sentence
- He inhaled through his nose, the nostrils flaring as he studied Vaughn.
- Flames could still be seen from town flaring up occasionally on a hill dotted with emergency vehicles.
- Heshke gasped with shock, and saw the flaring skeleton of the jet plummeting earthward in the darkness.
Forms of flaring
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more flaring |
| superlative | most flaring |
| Noun | |
| plural | flarings |
Words formed from flaring
Phrases with flaring
Questions about flaring
- What does flaring mean?
- Flaring means having a tendency of streaming, flapping, or spreading broadly as if within a current of air or in outer space.
- What part of speech is flaring?
- Flaring can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near flaring in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: flaring (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: “flaring.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flaring. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.