fading

FAY-ding/ˈfeɪdɪŋ/

4 meanings of fading

Practice

1
verb
Present participle of fade.
The colors in the tapestry are slowly fading after years of exposure to light.
Fading from view, the ship slipped behind the fog bank.
Note
The participle most often sits before a noun and works like an adjective: fading light, fading memory, fading eyesight, a fading reputation. Behind it stands mostly the intransitive verb, since things fade on their own. The same form also serves the transitive uses, so a player can be fading the ball and a bettor fading someone they bet against. When it names the process itself, it shades into the noun for gradual diminishment.
2
noununcountable
The gradual process by which something weakens or loses its color, sound, or intensity.
Like an old photo left in the sun, its image growing fainter year by year.
The gradual fading of the old photograph left only faint outlines of the family.
Doctors noted a steady fading of his hearing over several years.
Similardimming, weakening, decline, deterioration, waning
Oppositebrightening, strengthening
Note
The noun can be counted as well as used in the mass: fadings names the separate marks a slow loss leaves behind. Herman Melville's Israel Potter (1854) sets fadings beside tarnish on a rough earthen wall, as blemishes you could point to one by one. With an article and of (the fading of the photograph) it is the noun. With a direct object (fading the photograph) it is the verb's gerund.
3
nounobsolete
A type of dance formerly performed in Ireland.
Fading is a fine jig.
1607, Francis Beaumont, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”
Note
A name that survives mainly on the early modern stage. In Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), a character insists that "fading is a fine jig," which puts it among lively jigs rather than stately dances. The sense is long obsolete. A reader who meets it in old plays should not take it for the everyday noun of gradual diminishment.

Less common meaning

4
nounobsolete
The burden, or refrain, of a song: the recurring portion sung after each verse.
He has the prettiest love songs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings
c. 1610, William Shakespeare, “The Winters Tale”
Note
Here the word names the repeated tag sung between the verses of a song. In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale it appears in the plural beside dildos, another refrain word, in praise of love songs "without bawdry, which is strange with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings." The line suggests such refrains usually sounded suggestive. Like the Irish dance, this sense now belongs to the reading of old plays.

fading is a form of fade

fade, verb: To lose freshness, color, or brightness, becoming faint in hue or tint. Full entry

Forms: fadefades he/she/itfading -ing formfaded past tense, past participle
Spelling: fade → fading: drop the e, add -ing

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