dawning

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of dawn.

   Light was already dawning when the fishermen pushed off from shore.

   The truth was slowly dawning on him as the meeting went on.

   Note

   Here the word is still a verb, and an intransitive one: day dawns, an idea dawns, but nothing is dawned. In the figurative uses, on names the person who realizes, as in it was slowly dawning on her. The same spelling also serves the poetic noun for daybreak and the noun for first beginnings. Only the noun takes a plural, dawnings, or an adjective such as dewy.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The first stages or earliest signs of something coming into being.

   Like the first faint sprouts pushing up before a whole field turns green.

   The dawning of a new era brought hope to the struggling town.

   Historians point to that election as the dawning of modern politics.

   Similarbirth, beginning, advent, emergence, start (entry)

   Oppositeend, twilight, decline

3. 3
   nounliteraryuncountable

   The first appearance of daylight in the morning; daybreak.

   Like a stage slowly brightening as the lights come up before a show.

   By the dawning, the pilgrims had already climbed halfway up the hill.

   She loved the hush of the dawning, when the whole world seemed to hold its breath.

   Similardaybreak, sunrise

   Oppositedusk, nightfall, sunset

   Note

   A poet's word for daybreak, with a longer history than it looks: Middle English dawnynge reshaped an older dawing under the pull of North Germanic cognates such as Swedish and Danish dagning. It runs from Malory's "daunyng of the day" in Le Morte Darthur to Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman (1906), and it nearly always takes the: in the dawning. In plain prose, dawn or daybreak does the same work without the lyric coloring.

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