whitening

Syllables: whit·en·ing/ˈwaɪtn̩ɪŋ/

whitening is the present participle and gerund of whiten.

Noun

whitening (countable and uncountable, plural whitenings)

A substance, such as a bleach, used to make something white or whiter.
1. Whiting, a kind of fine white chalk.
The process of making something white or whiter.

whiten (third-person singular simple present whitens, present participle whitening, simple past and past participle whitened)

(ergative) (To cause) to become white or whiter; to bleach or blanch.
- Age had whitened his hair.
To increase the security of an iterated block cipher by steps that combine the data with portions of the key.
To normalize data so that the covariance matrix becomes the identity matrix; i.e., to remove correlations so each variable has unit variance.

plural	whitenings

What does whitening mean?: Whitening means a substance, such as a bleach, used to make something white or whiter.
What is whitening the present participle and gerund of?: Whitening is the present participle and gerund of whiten.
What part of speech is whitening?: Whitening is a noun.
How do you pronounce whitening?: Whitening is pronounced /ˈwaɪtn̩ɪŋ/.
What is the plural of whitening?: The plural of whitening is whitenings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: whitening (page history and authors); whiten (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-whitening.wav.

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