mushrooming

Pluralmushroomings

1. 1
   nounusually singular

   Rapid or explosive growth in number, size, or extent.

   The mushrooming of suburban developments has reshaped the region's farmland.

   Analysts pointed to the mushrooming of household debt as a warning sign.

   Similarproliferation, explosion, boom, growth, expansion

   Oppositedecline, contraction, shrinkage

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of mushroom.

   Demand for the vaccine was mushrooming across the country.

   Housing prices kept mushrooming despite government efforts to cool the market.

   Note

   The participle carries every sense of the verb, and because that verb is intransitive, nothing ever gets mushroomed: things simply mushroom. Its figurative use, growing quickly in scope or scale, sits naturally before a noun as an adjective, as in Stefanie Foster's "mushrooming housing developments" (2024). The same spelling also serves as a noun, both for explosive growth and for gathering wild mushrooms.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act of collecting mushrooms, especially gathering wild ones from fields or woods.

   Mushrooming after the first fall rains can fill a basket with chanterelles.

   Local guides offer mushrooming trips through the old-growth woods each September.

   Similarforaging

   Note

   A pastime noun built like fishing: people go mushrooming, the way a character in H. E. Bates's The Song of the Wren (1972) threatens to "go watercressing. Or mushrooming." The construction with go is the one to learn. It also sets this sense apart from explosive growth, which takes of and a noun instead, as in the mushrooming of debt.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The forming of a wide, rounded shape resembling a mushroom, as when a soft tip flattens and spreads under force.

   The mushrooming of the bullet on impact increased the severity of the wound.

   Gunsmiths examined the mushrooming of the soft lead round after firing.

   Similarexpansion, flattening

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