influencing

Pluralinfluencings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of influence.

   The new evidence is influencing how doctors treat the disease.

   Influencing public opinion was the main goal of the campaign.

   Note

   This is the working form of the verb that readers meet most often. As a participle it builds the progressive with be (is influencing); as a gerund it fills a noun's slot yet keeps its direct object (influencing voters). It usually has that object, though it can stand alone to mean exerting one's influence. An older meaning, "to cause to flow into, infuse," is now obsolete.

2. 2
   nounobsolete

   The capacity or action of affecting the character, beliefs, or behavior of a person or thing.

   My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings,

   1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc

   Note

   A noun that has dropped out of use, though Shelley still reaches for it in Mont Blanc (1816), where the mind "renders and receives fast influencings." It behaved like influence itself, taking adjectives and a plural, influencings. Modern writers should simply say influence. The -ing form survives as the verbal gerund, as in influencing public opinion, where it takes an object rather than an adjective.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2