enhancing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of enhance.

   The team is enhancing the software with new security features.

   Enhancing the building's insulation cut heating costs sharply.

   Note

   Medical imaging gives the verb an intransitive use with no object at all. An organ, tissue, or lesion that takes up contrast agent is said to enhance, so a report can say a lesion is enhancing. Everywhere else the participle is transitive: someone is enhancing something. An older meaning, to lift or raise up, is now obsolete.

2. 2
   adjective

   Acting to improve or increase the quality, value, or strength of something.

   The designer chose an enhancing palette that brightened the whole office.

   Certain spices have an enhancing quality, deepening the flavor of a plain dish.

   Similarflattering, complementary

   Note

   Unlike many participles, this one grades like a true adjective: things can be more enhancing, most enhancing, or very enhancing. It pairs neatly with detracting, as in Anderson, Mulligan and Goodman's 1982 study of outdoor sound, where some sounds were more enhancing and most more detracting. Whatever benefits is introduced with to: very enhancing to one's internal reputation.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act or process of improving the quality, value, or strength of something.

   The enhancing of the old manuscript's faded ink revealed hidden words.

   Digital enhancing of the recording removed most of the background noise.

   Similarimprovement

   Oppositedegradation

   Note

   Here the word behaves like an ordinary noun. It takes an article and an of-phrase (the enhancing of social protection), it can follow an (an enhancing in our degree of emulating), and it even has a plural, enhancings. Those features tell it apart from the verb's gerund, which takes a direct object with no of (enhancing the insulation). Enhancement covers the same ground.

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