Word.ws English Dictionary

surpassing

surpassing is the present participle and gerund of surpass.

Meaning of surpass

Verb

surpass (third-person singular simple present surpasses, present participle surpassing, simple past and past participle surpassed)

  1. (transitive) To go beyond or exceed (something) in an adjudicative or literal sense.
    • The former problem student surpassed his instructor's expectations and scored top marks on his examination.

Adjective

surpassing (comparative more surpassing, superlative most surpassing)

  1. Becoming superior to others; becoming excellent; exceptional; exceeding.
    • "Yet once again," exclaimed he, passionately, "let me gaze on that beautiful and beloved face! let me see if sorrow has cast a shadow on its surpassing loveliness! I will not let her know how near I am, and how wretched! No, in secret and in silence will I look upon her once more; and then...1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Past”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 87

Noun

surpassing (plural surpassings)

  1. The act or process by which something is surpassed; a bettering.
    • In both of these surpassings, the human being, in being freed, is freed both to be itself and to be beyond itself; but the second orients us more fully towards being free beyond self-determination.2001, William Desmond, Ethics and the Between, page 347

Forms of surpassing

Adjective
comparativemore surpassing
superlativemost surpassing
Noun
pluralsurpassings

Words formed from surpassing

Questions about surpassing

What does surpassing mean?
Surpassing means becoming superior to others; becoming excellent; exceptional; exceeding.
What is surpassing the present participle and gerund of?
Surpassing is the present participle and gerund of surpass.
What part of speech is surpassing?
Surpassing can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near surpassing in the dictionary

  1. surpasser
  2. surpassers
  3. surpasses
  4. surpassest
  5. surpasseth
  6. surpassing
  7. surpassingly
  8. surpassingness
  9. surpassings
  10. surpassive
  11. surpay

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: surpassing (page history and authors); surpass (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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