decaying

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of decay.

   The city's decaying bridges have become a serious safety concern.

   Unstable nuclei keep decaying until they reach a stable form.

   Note

   The participle often stands before a noun as an adjective, and the noun tells you which kind of decay is meant: decaying leaves rot, a decaying neighborhood declines, a decaying orbit slowly loses altitude, decaying atoms give off radiation, and decaying software falls behind its environment. After be it forms the progressive: the fruit is decaying.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The process by which something undergoes decay.

   Cold, dry soil slows the decaying of buried wood.

   The documentary charts the slow decaying of a once-proud mill town.

   Similarrotting, decomposition, decline, deterioration

   Note

   The noun keeps the eye on the process as it unfolds, and it typically comes framed by the and of: the slow decaying of a mill town. It can even be plural, as when William Jenkyn's Exposition upon the Epistle of Jude sets "spiritual witherings and decayings" against the word of God.

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