fighting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of fight.

   Firefighters spent the night fighting the blaze on the hillside.

   She is fighting to keep her small business open through the downturn.

   Note

   One spelling does two grammatical jobs. As a participle it follows be in progressive tenses (she is fighting to keep the shop open). As a gerund it acts as a noun but keeps the verb's direct object: fighting the blaze. That object tells it apart from the noun for conflict, which needs of (the fighting of the blaze) and can be pluralized as fightings, which no gerund can.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Struggle between opposing people or groups, whether by violence or some other form of conflict.

   Decades of fighting destroyed much of the country's farmland.

   Police were called to break up fighting outside the bar around midnight.

   Similarconflict, warfare, combat, violence, hostilities

   Oppositepeace

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A fight or battle; a particular occasion on which people fight.

   The fighting at Antietam lasted from dawn until late afternoon.

   Witnesses described the fighting outside the stadium as the worst the city had seen in years.

   Similarbattle, combat, action, clash

   Note

   The plural shows this sense most plainly: fightings, each one an occasion rather than an ongoing activity. In 1840 Carlyle writes of "Mahomet's fightings with the Greeks." In 1860 John Yeardley pairs the plural with wars to reject "all wars and fightings." In the singular it usually takes the and is tied to a place or event: the fighting at Antietam.

4. 4
   adjective

   Currently involved in a war or some other kind of conflict.

   By winter, both fighting armies were short of food and ammunition.

   The fighting factions within the party refused to appear together in public.

   Similarwarring, battling, belligerent, combatant

   Oppositepeaceful

   Note

   Two older words meet in one spelling. The adjective comes from the Old English present participle feohtende. The noun for conflict descends from a separate verbal noun, fihtung. Middle English forms like fightand and fightyng still keep the two endings apart. Placed before its noun, as in fighting armies or fighting factions, it describes sides actually in conflict, unlike the provoking sense, which describes what starts a conflict.

5. 5
   adjective

   Apt to provoke a fight.

   Insulting a man's cooking is fighting talk in this kitchen.

   His remark about the referee's eyesight struck the crowd as fighting words.

   Similarprovocative, inflammatory, belligerent, combative

   Oppositeconciliatory, soothing

   Note

   A sense that lives mostly in one phrase: fighting words, the retort in Hold That Lion! (1947), "Them's fighting words in my country!" The adjective names what a remark will start, not who is fighting, and it comes before its noun: fighting words, fighting talk, a fighting insult. Marjorie Kelly's The Divine Right of Capital (2003) uses it figuratively, for ideas that will anger the powerful.

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