Word.ws English Dictionary

thickening

/ˈθɪkənɪŋ/

thickening noun: the process of making something, or becoming, thick or viscous. Also the present participle and gerund of thicken.

Noun

thickening (countable and uncountable, plural thickenings)

  1. The process of making something, or becoming, thick or viscous.
  2. A substance, usually a source of starch, used to thicken a sauce.
  3. A thickened part of a structure.
    • […] the inner layer (of nearly equally large cells) lacks the regular semiannular or annular thickenings of most other leafy liverworts […]1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page 6
    • They disappear at once on slightly relaxing the air-pressure, whilst true incipient thickenings of the surface remain white and unpliably stiff.1902, Edwin Hurry Fenwick, Obscure Diseases of the Urethra, page 30

Adjective

thickening (not comparable)

  1. Beginning to thicken, becoming thicker.
    • From Keighley onwards we had obviously returned to civilisation, for the surrounding country was now studded with the sodium street lights of suburbia and a thickening industrial haze was blotting out the moon.1960 January, G. Freeman Allen, “"Condor"—British Railways' fastest freight train”, in Trains Illustrated, page 48

Also used as

thickening is also the present participle and gerund of thicken.

Examples of thickening in a sentence

  • In microgravity their arteries are thickening and stiffening and the muscle of the heart weakening and shrinking.
  • The enlargement, thickening, and fibrosis of the labia is termed esthiomene.
  • A low fog rolled across the frozen water, faint ripples thickening into groundmist at the tree line.

All 20 example sentences with thickening

Forms of thickening

pluralthickenings

Plural of thickening: thickenings

Origin of thickening

From thicken + -ing.

Words formed from thickening

Phrases with thickening

Questions about thickening

What does thickening mean?
Thickening means the process of making something, or becoming, thick or viscous.
What part of speech is thickening?
Thickening can be a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce thickening?
Thickening is pronounced /ˈθɪkənɪŋ/.
What is the plural of thickening?
The plural of thickening is thickenings.

Words near thickening in the dictionary

  1. thickenable
  2. thickened
  3. thickened up
  4. thickener
  5. thickeners
  6. thickening
  7. thickening agent
  8. thickening agents
  9. thickening layer
  10. thickening ring
  11. thickening time

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thickening (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-thickening.wav.

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