differing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of differ.

   The two reports, differing on only a few details, reached the same conclusion.

   Differing sharply on the budget, the council postponed the vote.

   Note

   Because differ never takes a direct object, the participle stands alone or leads into a phrase: witnesses differing over a detail, a council differing on the budget. It can carry either of the verb's main ideas, being unlike or disagreeing, and the context decides which. Before a noun, the same spelling usually belongs to the adjective meaning 'unlike' rather than to the verb.

2. 2
   adjectiveformal

   Not the same as one another; unlike, dissimilar, and distinct.

   The committee struggled to reconcile their differing accounts of the incident.

   Two differing schools of thought emerged among the researchers.

   Similarconflicting, contrasting, divergent, different, dissimilar

   Oppositeidentical, matching, similar

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The fact or state of being unlike; a difference.

   The differing between the original and the copy was hard to spot.

   Even a slight differing in temperature can change the result.

   Similardifference, variation, discrepancy, disparity

   Oppositesimilarity

   Note

   A rarer cousin of difference that sounds most natural in the plural and in the prose of criticism and theory. It likes company of its own shape: Robert Bator's "differings and philosophizings" (1983), and Youru Wang's "differings and deferrings of language" (2007). The -ing keeps a sense of ongoing process. For a single, plain contrast, difference remains the safer choice.

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