flaring

Pluralflarings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of flare.

   Tensions have been flaring along the border since the disputed election.

   Crews were flaring the excess gas from the new well all week.

   Note

   The -ing form follows be for what is happening now (tensions have been flaring) and also names the act on its own. It can take an object when it means burning something off: crews flaring the excess gas. That transitive use is the one the oil business turned into its term for burning waste gas; with sudden outbreaks, up often follows: the pain keeps flaring up.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The action of something that flares, or a single instance of it, as when a flame suddenly blazes up.

   Nurses watch for a flaring of the nostrils, a sign that a child is struggling to breathe.

   Occasional flarings of the old gas lamps were the only light on the empty street.

   Note

   The noun counts as well as not: a sudden flaring, or several flarings. Washington Irving, writing as Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, lists "flarings of candles" beside shooting stars and howling dogs as omens for the fortune-tellers to read, and the plural still suits a run of separate bursts, like the old gas lamps flickering on an empty street.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The deliberate burning, in the open air, of natural gas produced as a by-product of petrochemical processes, especially oil extraction.

   Regulators want producers to cut flaring and capture the gas for sale instead.

   Satellite images showed that flaring at the oil field had doubled in a year.

   Note

   An oil-industry term, often written in full as gas flaring. A site burns gas it cannot use, turning methane into carbon dioxide; the alternative, venting, lets the methane out unburned. Damian Carrington's 2023 report on Turkmenistan notes that flaring is easy to spot, so a quiet switch from flaring to venting can lie behind vast methane releases. Regulators speak of cutting flaring.

4. 4
   adjective

   Tending to stream, flap, or spread out broadly, as if carried on a current of air or drifting in outer space.

   Flaring waves of green light rippled across the northern sky.

   The dancers wore flaring silk sleeves that streamed behind them as they spun.

   Similarflowing, streaming

   Note

   The participle turned descriptive, and it can be graded: more flaring, most flaring. It suits what streams and wavers rather than holds still. An 1878 account in Acta Victoriana has flaring waves of light chasing each other too fast for the eye, and a 1939 MGM story sets "a great flaring fire" against the small steady flame a cook needs. Steady is its natural opposite.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4