coasting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of coast.

   The plane was coasting toward the runway with its engines idling.

   Coasting on her early success, she put in little real effort.

   Note

   Today the form is almost always intransitive: a car is coasting downhill, a student is coasting through a course, with no direct object following. Older English could coast a shore, or coast a traveler along a riverbank, but those transitive uses are obsolete. When the -ing form names an activity rather than an action in progress, it shades into the nouns, such as rolling without engine power.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of disengaging a moving vehicle's gears and rolling along without engine power.

   Coasting in neutral was once taught as a way to save gas on descents.

   Many modern cars discourage coasting because it reduces braking control.

   Similargliding

   Note

   Railways have their own use for the word. Rail reported in 2020 that Avanti West Coast had its Pendolino trains coast without power for three miles near Harrow during an overhead line failure. What saves fuel in a car became a way to keep a train moving and limit disruption. Here the vehicle simply runs on the momentum it already has.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Travel by ship along a coastline or between ports.

   Coasting allowed merchants to stop at every harbor along the route.

   Before deep-sea navigation improved, coasting was the safest way to move goods.

   Note

   A seafaring noun that works both as a count noun and a mass noun. Countable, it names a single run between ports, and it sits comfortably before another noun, as in Harriet W. Daly's coasting trips of 1887. Uncountable, it names the practice in general. George Whitefield made it a metaphor in 1772, calling earthly life a series of sublunary coastings that end in an eternal harbor.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The continuation or worsening of symptoms after treatment ends, occurring before gradual improvement begins.

   Coasting after chemotherapy can leave patients feeling worse for weeks before recovery starts.

   Because of coasting, the numbness in his feet kept spreading for weeks after his last dose before it finally began to fade.

   Note

   Clinicians reach for the word when a drug's harm outlasts the drug. Its classic setting is nerve damage from some cancer treatments. There, numbness and tingling can keep spreading for weeks after the last dose. The delay often alarms patients who expected relief as soon as treatment stopped. In clinical writing the noun is usually uncountable, as in "some coasting" or "a period of coasting."

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