breathing
Pluralbreathings (some meanings)
Pluralbreathings (some meanings)
- 1Gerund of breathe.
The doctor listened to the patient's breathing through a stethoscope.
Slow, even breathing returned once the panic faded.
Note
The verb's activity turned into a noun, and it counts both ways. Uncountable, it names respiration as a process: her breathing grew shallow. Countable, it names single breaths, and the plural is real. The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal of 1848 worries over patients' "breathings, cryings, and excretings", a list of bodily acts each treated as something that happens many times.
- 2Present participle of breathe.
The swimmers were breathing in rhythm with each stroke.
She lay still, breathing slowly to calm her nerves.
Note
The -ing form doing a verb's work. It follows be in progressive tenses and can still take an object: breathing fresh air, breathing smoke. The same spelling serves the noun for respiration, and the test is what modifies it. An adverb (breathing slowly) marks the verb; an adjective (slow breathing) marks the noun.
- 3A diacritical mark indicating the presence or absence of aspiration on a sound.
The editor added a rough breathing over the first vowel of the manuscript.
Copyists sometimes left the breathings off short, common words.
Note
A grammarian's use of the word, named for the puff of breath the mark records. Aspiration here is the phonetic kind: the breathy h-sound a vowel may or may not carry. Don't confuse it with the aspiration of the prayerful sense, which is longing, not air. The noun counts normally, so one line of text can carry several breathings.
- 4Any gentle influence or working upon a person; an inspiring stir of feeling.
A breathing of inspiration moved the poet to take up her pen again.
There was in his words a gentle breathing that calmed the frightened child.
Similarstirring, whisper, influence
Note
Devotional language is its home: the breathings of the Holy Spirit, a gentle influence pictured as breath moving over a person. It is often plural, and it usually names its source with of. Keep it apart from the prayerful sense. Here the breathing reaches the person from outside; there it rises from the person toward something.
- 5A deep longing or aspiration; a silent, private prayer.
In the stillness of the chapel, every breathing rose toward one hope.
Her morning breathing was a wordless longing for her son's return.
Similarlonging, aspiration, yearning, prayer, sigh
Note
The longing here points somewhere, and the preposition that points it is after. John Tillotson, in a funeral sermon of 1683, speaks of "earnest Desires and Breathings after that blessed State". The pairing with desires shows its register: devotional, usually plural, and close in meaning to yearning. A breathing after heaven is a wish too deep or private to be spoken aloud.
Less common meaning
- 6A pause long enough to recover one's breath; by extension, a delay or short spell of time.
Like the pause a runner takes between laps to catch their breath.
The weary soldiers were granted a brief breathing before the next march.
She begged a moment's breathing before answering the magistrate.
Note
Shakespeare's word for a pause, from Much Ado About Nothing, where a week's wait before a wedding counts as a breathing. The sense stretched from the moment needed to catch one's breath to any delay at all. Today it is archaic. A modern reader will take "a breathing" as respiration, so use it only when period flavor is the aim.
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Practice
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Origin
Formed from the verb "breathe" combined with the suffix "-ing."