flooding

1. 1
   noununcountable

   An overflow or sudden gush of water spilling onto ground that is normally dry.

   Coastal towns brace for flooding whenever a storm surge coincides with high tide.

   Residents waded through knee-deep flooding to reach the evacuation buses.

   Similarinundation, deluge

   Note

   It works as a mass noun and as a count noun. As a mass noun it names the condition: towns brace for flooding. As a count noun it marks single events that can be numbered. Trains Illustrate in December 1960 calls one episode the first flooding of the junction for 36 years, and Mark Twain counts a hundred and seventy-five floodings of the earth in 1875.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of flood.

   The swollen river is flooding nearby farmland faster than the levees can hold.

   Emergency crews worked all night as seawater kept flooding the tunnels.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every use of the verb, not just the watery one: a river flooding farmland, complaints flooding an inbox, a user flooding a chat room, a mother flooding after childbirth. In the chat sense it can stand without an object, as in 'someone kept flooding'. Once it takes an article or a plural (a flooding, floodings), it has become the noun for a flood.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A type of therapy that treats a phobia by exposing the patient to the feared object all at once, rather than gradually.

   Like ripping off a bandage in one go rather than peeling it back slowly.

   The clinic offered flooding to patients whose spider phobia had not responded to slower methods.

   During flooding, the man with a fear of heights spent an hour on a rooftop terrace until his panic faded.

   Note

   The name pictures the method: the feared thing arrives all at once, as a flood does, rather than being let in by degrees. That suddenness is what sets it apart from gradual approaches to a phobia. It is a noun of the clinic, used mostly without an article: a patient undergoes flooding, and a therapist offers treatment by flooding.

4. 4
   nounfigurativelyuncountable

   A state of emotional overwhelm that can tip into a primal sense of rage or panic.

   Like a dam breaking: the held-back emotion bursts through all at once.

   Under relentless pressure, flooding set in and he could no longer reason or speak calmly.

   She recognized the early signs of flooding and stepped away before her panic turned to rage.

   Note

   Psychology borrows the water image for feeling that rises past the point where a person can think or speak calmly. It behaves like a condition: flooding sets in, builds, or is caught in its early signs. Keep it apart from the phobia therapy, which shares the field and the name. This flooding happens to someone, while that one is done to them deliberately.

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