denouncing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of denounce.

   The senator was denouncing the policy long before it became unpopular.

   Denouncing the verdict, the lawyers walked out of the courtroom.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every live use of the verb, and all of them are transitive: one is always denouncing someone or something. Besides condemning or accusing, it can mean formally ending an agreement, as in denouncing a treaty or an armistice. Followed directly by an object it is still a verb. Followed by of, as in his denouncing of the regime, it has become the noun for a condemnation.

   The government was denouncing the treaty it had signed only a decade earlier.

   Neighbors were denouncing one another to the authorities.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   An open, public condemnation or accusation directed at a person, group, or action as wrongful.

   His public denouncing of the regime eventually cost him his post.

   The denouncing of innocent neighbors became common during the purge.

   Similardenunciation, condemnation, censure, accusation

   Oppositepraise, endorsement

   Note

   A countable noun that happily takes a plural. Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) mocks someone's "drawlings and denouncings" alongside his humming and hawing. That list shows its natural habitat: a run of -ing nouns naming repeated, faintly tiresome behavior. Where denunciation presents the condemnation as a finished thing, denouncing keeps the feel of an act still going on.

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