weakening
weakening is the present participle and gerund of weaken.
Noun
weakening (countable and uncountable, plural weakenings)
- An instance or process of loss of strength.
- That immortal creature had gone over the proofs with great pains — had of course taken out the stiflings — hard-plungings, lungeings, and other convulsions — and had also taken out her weakenings and damagings of her own effects.1855, Charles Dickens, Household Words
- A structural principle of mathematical logic that states that the hypotheses of any derived fact may be freely extended with additional assumptions.
Meaning of weaken
Verb
weaken (third-person singular simple present weakens, present participle weakening, simple past and past participle weakened)
- To make weaker or less strong.
- weaken a bond
- Synonyms:
- emasculate
- To become weaker or less strong.
- Over the years my enthusiasm for the job has weakened.
Forms of weakening
| plural | weakenings |
|---|
Phrases with weakening
Questions about weakening
- What does weakening mean?
- Weakening means an instance or process of loss of strength.
- What is weakening the present participle and gerund of?
- Weakening is the present participle and gerund of weaken.
- What part of speech is weakening?
- Weakening is a noun.
- What is the plural of weakening?
- The plural of weakening is weakenings.
Words near weakening in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: weakening (page history and authors); weaken (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-weakening.wav.
Cite this entry: “weakening.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/weakening. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.