escaping

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of escape.

   The prisoners were escaping through a tunnel when the alarm went off.

   Escaping the crowded city each weekend kept her sane.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. It is a verb in progressive tenses (they were escaping) and a noun-like gerund (escaping the city kept her sane). It inherits both patterns of escape: intransitive, for getting free, and transitive, as in escaping notice. Programmers use the transitive pattern too. Escaping a character means marking it to be read literally, often by putting another character in front of it.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of someone who breaks free or gets away; a getting loose.

   The escaping of the captured soldiers was planned for weeks in advance.

   His repeated escaping from custody made headlines across the country.

   Similarflight, breakout, getaway

3. 3
   noununcountable

   That which leaks or flows out from something; an emission.

   The escaping of steam from the boiler valve hissed loudly through the workshop.

   Engineers traced the faint escaping of fumes to a loose fitting near the tank.

   Similarleakage, leak, emission, discharge, outflow

   Note

   Here the word names the stuff rather than the act, so it can be counted: escapings, plural, for whatever seeps out in wisps or bursts. Joseph Dever's No Lasting Home (1947) has "faint, yet growing escapings of gas." William W. Johnstone's Gunsight Crossing (2006) turns it comic with "the gastronomical escapings of certain people," a mock-delicate cover for wind. Contrast the act of getting away, which names the getting free itself.

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