falling

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of fall.

   Snow was falling steadily across the valley by midnight.

   Prices are falling faster than analysts had predicted this quarter.

   Note

   The -ing form does three jobs. It builds the progressive (prices are falling), modifies a noun like an adjective (a falling leaf, falling prices), and as a gerund names the act itself (falling is the danger on ice). An adverb can sharpen the adjectival use, as in Railway Magazine's sharply-falling grades of 1941. Because fall is intransitive, it has no passive, and the old transitive use 'to let fall' is obsolete.

2. 2
   noununcountablenoun from verb

   Verbal noun of fall.

   The gradual falling of the water level worried the farmers downstream.

   The falling of night brought a sudden chill to the camp.

   Note

   Where fall usually names a single event, falling names the process as it unfolds: the falling of night, of a water level. It is mostly uncountable, but a plural exists. Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living uses it for bodily fits, "fallings and reelings," set beside epilepsies. Unlike the gerund, this noun takes articles and of-phrases: the falling of the leaves.

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