heightening

heightening is the present participle and gerund of heighten.

Meaning of heighten

heighten (third-person singular simple present heightens, present participle heightening, simple past and past participle heightened)

To make high; to raise higher; to elevate.
- Black Bridge, near Machynlleth, is being heightened by one metre in a £3.6 million project to reduce delays caused by flooding.2021 June 2, “Network News: Cambrian Line bridge is raised”, in RAIL, number 932, page 23
To advance, increase, augment, make larger, more intense, stronger etc.
- to heighten beauty

heightening (plural heightenings)

The act by which something is heightened or increased.
- For them, there was "an increase in total lymphocyte production, and a higher IG antibody response," among other heightenings.2003, Gary Null, Germs, Biological Warfare, Vaccinations: What You Need to Know
- There are flourishes and coloratura passages in this art, heightenings and sharpenings of the line that serve only to give the needy linear system a value of its own in confrontation with nature.1970, Heinrich Wölfflin, Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, page 4

plural	heightenings

What does heightening mean?: Heightening means the act by which something is heightened or increased.
What is heightening the present participle and gerund of?: Heightening is the present participle and gerund of heighten.
What part of speech is heightening?: Heightening is a noun.
What is the plural of heightening?: The plural of heightening is heightenings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: heightening (page history and authors); heighten (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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