enriching

1. 1
   adjective

   Adding value of some kind: financial, intellectual, or emotional.

   The mentorship program proved deeply enriching for new employees.

   Shareholders called the merger an enriching deal that doubled their dividends.

   Similarrewarding, fulfilling, valuable, beneficial, lucrative

   Oppositeunrewarding

   Note

   A gradable adjective, so it takes degree words freely: very enriching, deeply enriching, more enriching, most enriching. Gradability is the quickest way to tell it from the verb form, which needs an object. A trip that is enriching describes the trip, while a trip enriching your life is the verb at work. It sits comfortably before nouns like experience, visit or course.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of enrich.

   The mill is enriching its grain with iron and folic acid.

   Travel keeps enriching her understanding of other cultures.

   Note

   Every sense of enrich is transitive, so this form nearly always has an object right after it: enriching the soil, enriching uranium, enriching flour with iron. The object decides the field, which may be farming, nuclear fuel, food fortification or plain enhancement. Without an object, the same spelling has usually crossed over into the adjective, as in a very enriching year.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The process of making something richer, fuller, or more valuable.

   The slow enriching of the floodplain produced unusually fertile farmland.

   Critics praised the enriching of the orchestra with rare period instruments.

   Similarimprovement, enhancement, fertilization, augmentation

   Oppositeimpoverishment, depletion

   Note

   A countable noun for individual acts of making richer, with the plural enrichings. William Jay's Sermons (1849) uses it that way in a rhetorical chain of ennoblings, enrichings and enlargings, where each -ing names a well-meant alteration to Scripture that backfires. In ordinary prose it typically follows the and takes of, as in the enriching of the soil.

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