ballooning

Pluralballoonings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Flying hot-air balloons as a sport or for pleasure.

   Ballooning attracts people who love quiet flight and wide open views.

   He gave up ballooning after the cost of fuel rose sharply.

   Note

   A pastime name that behaves like sailing or skiing. It takes no article, and it pairs naturally with take up and give up. David Simpson, writing in The Guardian Weekly in 2013, says the sport has sponsored "heroes and hucksters". On the heroic side he places the dedicated scientist, shivering at altitude while recording atmospheric pressure and wind speed.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of balloon.

   Her debts were ballooning out of control by year's end.

   The project's costs are ballooning beyond the original budget.

   Note

   The verb form shares its spelling with the adjectives and nouns, so position tells them apart. After is or are, as in costs are ballooning, it is the verb. Before a noun, as in ballooning expenses, it is the "growing fast" adjective. The verb is usually intransitive, but it can take an object, as in ballooning a ball high. Said of an aircraft, it means plunging alternately up and down.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of something swelling or expanding in size.

   The ballooning of the tent in the wind made it hard to fold.

   Engineers noted the ballooning of the metal panel under intense heat.

   Similarswelling, expansion, bulging, billowing

   Oppositecontraction

   Note

   Medicine gives this noun its countable use: each bulge is a ballooning, and several are balloonings. Margaret McCartney's The Patient Paradox (2013) calls aneurysms of the aorta balloonings of an artery that is normally straight. Used uncountably, the word names swelling as a process, as in the ballooning of a tent in the wind. In the plural, it names the swellings themselves.

4. 4
   adjective

   Growing larger or more numerous at a rapid rate.

   The company struggled with ballooning expenses and shrinking profits.

   Reporters covered the city's ballooning population over the past decade.

   Similarsoaring

   Oppositeshrinking, dwindling

5. 5
   adjective

   Climbing or floating high up into the air.

   The ballooning embers drifted high above the dying campfire.

   Spectators traced the ballooning fireworks against the night sky.

   Similarrising, soaring, floating

   Note

   Ball games are where this sense is most at home. A ballooning shot in cricket climbs high rather than skimming the ground, and one that carries far enough can score six runs. The word describes the shape of the ball's flight, its high arc, more than its speed.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The technique by which spiders, mites, and caterpillars travel through the air on strands of silk caught by the wind.

   Researchers documented ballooning in several spider species across the meadow.

   Ballooning lets newly hatched spiders colonize islands far from the shore.

   Note

   A naturalist's word in which no balloon is involved. The animal lets out fine silk threads that catch moving air, along with atmospheric electric fields, and these lift it away. It is passive kiting rather than true flight. That explains how spiders, mites and caterpillars can turn up considerable distances from where they started.

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