isolating

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of isolate.

   The lab spent weeks isolating the active compound from the plant extract.

   By isolating the faulty component, engineers restored power to the rest of the grid.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs here. After be, it describes an action in progress (the lab was isolating the compound). At the head of a phrase, it acts as a noun (isolating the fault took hours). In both roles it keeps the verb's transitive habit and needs an object: a patient, a pure substance, a bacterial strain, an electrical component.

2. 2
   adjective

   Describing a language with a low number of morphemes per word and no inflectional endings, expressing grammar through separate words and word order.

   Like a sentence built from interchangeable bricks, each word a fixed unit, with meaning set by their arrangement rather than by reshaping the bricks.

   Vietnamese is a strongly isolating language, marking tense and number with separate words.

   In isolating languages, grammatical roles depend heavily on the order of words in a sentence.

   Similaranalytic

   Oppositesynthetic

   Note

   A linguist's term that describes whole languages, not single words or speakers. It is gradable, so you can call a language strongly isolating or more isolating than another, and specialists treat it as a matter of degree. It has nothing to do with remoteness. The link to the verb form is that each word stands apart, unaltered by endings.

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