changing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of change.

   The leaves are changing color as fall sets in.

   Investors worried that consumer habits were changing.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. Before a noun it works like an adjective, as in a changing world or the changing scene, and there it carries the intransitive meaning of becoming different. After be it forms the progressive. As a gerund it can take an object and reach the other meanings of change: changing a diaper, changing trains. Only the countable noun takes a plural.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   An act or process of becoming different; alteration.

   The gradual changing of the coastline reshaped the harbor over decades.

   Historians traced the slow changing of social customs through old letters.

   Similaralteration, transformation, evolution

   Note

   A noun that can be counted, unlike the gerund: it takes a plural, changings. George Fox's epistle of 1654 sets God's unchangeable life against a time "before changings and alterings were," pairing it with another -ing noun. In that plural it names a series of separate shifts rather than one ongoing process, and it reads as a deliberate, somewhat old-fashioned choice beside plain change.

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