Word.ws English Dictionary

surfacing

surfacing is the present participle and gerund of surface.

Noun

surfacing (plural surfacings)

  1. Material used to make a surface.
    • asphalt road surfacings
  2. The act of coming above the surface.
    • The researchers measured the number of surfacings per minute by each dolphin.
    • I practice nightly, I try to keep ahead. / This art of surfacing is all but dead.1979 June, “Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)”, in The Fine Art of Surfacing, performed by The Boomtown Rats

Meaning of surface

Verb

surface (third-person singular simple present surfaces, present participle surfacing, simple past and past participle surfaced)

  1. (transitive) To provide with a surface; to apply a surface to.
    • The crew surfaced the road with bitumen.
  2. (intransitive) To rise to the surface.
    • There was great relief when the missing diver finally surfaced.
  3. (transitive) To bring to the surface.
    • Sage went immediately to work; Damien surfaced the submarine and readied the group to meet outside the hatch.2007, Patrick Valentine, The Sage of Aquarius, page 182
  4. (figuratively, intransitive) To come out of hiding.
    • The company believes the stolen chocolate bars could surface through unofficial sales channels across European markets.2026 March 29, “Someone stole 413,793 KitKat bars and an entire truck in Europe”, in syracuse.com
  5. (intransitive, facts, content, etc) To become known or apparent; to appear or be found; to come to light.
    • Subordinate clauses, by contrast, exhibit V1 or V2 only around 35% of the time, with the verb usually surfacing later.2013, George Walkden, “The status of hwæt in Old English”, in English Language and Linguistics, volume 17, number 3, →DOI
  6. (transitive) To make (information, facts, content, etc) known.
    • They're not growing. Why would I surface them to new people? [...That] makes our video surface less, and that makes the next video surface less.2024 May 24, Keith Habersberger, "The Try Guys Tell All" (video on Anthony Padilla's YouTube channel), 5:20

See all 15 meanings of surface

Forms of surfacing

pluralsurfacings

Questions about surfacing

What does surfacing mean?
Surfacing means material used to make a surface.
What is surfacing the present participle and gerund of?
Surfacing is the present participle and gerund of surface.
What part of speech is surfacing?
Surfacing is a noun.
What is the plural of surfacing?
The plural of surfacing is surfacings.

Words near surfacing in the dictionary

  1. surfaces of revolution
  2. surfaceward
  3. surfacewards
  4. surfacial
  5. surfacic
  6. surfacing
  7. surfacings
  8. surfacism
  9. surfactant
  10. surfactantless
  11. surfactantlike

Source and license

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