steepening
steepening is the present participle and gerund of steepen.
Meaning of steepen
Verb
steepen (third-person singular simple present steepens, present participle steepening, simple past and past participle steepened)
- To make steeper.
- With a rare and beautiful ease one can now ring up a boffin, as I did the other day, and say: "As a price for not opposing our Parliamentary Powers for a new marshalling yard, the Council at X demands that the bridge over X Lane shall have 16 ft. 6 in. headroom. This means steepening our gradient...1960 April, G. F. Fiennes, “Unpunctuality - the cause and the cure”, in Trains Illustrated, page 244
- To become steeper.
- As the way steepened […] I could detect in the hollow of the hill some traces of the old path.
Noun
steepening (plural steepenings)
- The process of becoming steeper.
Forms of steepening
| plural | steepenings |
|---|
Questions about steepening
- What does steepening mean?
- Steepening means the process of becoming steeper.
- What is steepening the present participle and gerund of?
- Steepening is the present participle and gerund of steepen.
- What part of speech is steepening?
- Steepening is a noun.
- What is the plural of steepening?
- The plural of steepening is steepenings.
Words near steepening in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: steepening (page history and authors); steepen (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: “steepening.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/steepening. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.