ratcheting

ratcheting is the present participle and gerund of ratchet.

Noun

ratcheting (countable and uncountable, plural ratchetings)

The act by which something is ratcheted.
A conjurers' trick of bending an object back and forth to induce metal fatigue, so that it can be broken later by rubbing it.

ratchet (third-person singular simple present ratchets, present participle ratcheting, simple past and past participle ratcheted)

(intransitive) To increment or decrement; especially, to offer controlled motion that can increment while resisting decrement, or vice versa.
- This holddown ratchets, which allows the person loading the trailer to cinch down the straps.
(transitive) To cause (something) to become incremented or decremented.
- Get this holddown into position, but don't start ratcheting it yet. When I say go, you start ratcheting it, OK?

plural	ratchetings

What does ratcheting mean?: Ratcheting means the act by which something is ratcheted.
What is ratcheting the present participle and gerund of?: Ratcheting is the present participle and gerund of ratchet.
What part of speech is ratcheting?: Ratcheting is a noun.
What is the plural of ratcheting?: The plural of ratcheting is ratchetings.

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