improving

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of improve.

   The weather is improving after days of heavy storms.

   Improving steadily, the patient was soon able to walk unaided.

   Note

   The verb form works in two directions. It is transitive in improving the road and intransitive in the weather is improving. To tell it from the uplifting adjective, look at what the word does. The participle takes an object or describes change still under way. Improving books, by contrast, are books that improve their reader. In older prose the form can also mean turning something to good account, a dated use of improve.

2. 2
   adjective

   Tending to make someone or something better, especially (in dated use) to educate or morally better a person.

   She recommended several improving books to her younger brother.

   The mentor offered improving advice that genuinely changed his outlook.

   Similaredifying, instructive, uplifting, enlightening, educational

   Oppositedegrading

   Note

   Behind the general sense sits an older moral one: what improves the mind or character. David Hume in 1741 finds nothing "so improving to the Temper" as the study of poetry, music or painting. In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom gets an apple "along with an improving lecture." Improving books and lectures carry that dated flavor. It is gradable: more improving, most improving.

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