overcoming

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of overcome.

   The team kept overcoming one obstacle after another all season.

   Overcoming addiction usually requires sustained support and effort.

   Note

   Two jobs share this -ing form. After be it makes the progressive (they were overcoming the odds). On its own it heads a gerund phrase that acts as a noun (overcoming addiction takes time). Either way it stays a verb and takes a direct object, as overcome usually does. That is the test against the countable noun, which needs of (the overcoming of grief) and can be plural: overcomings.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of getting the better of something or getting past it.

   The memoir traces her gradual overcoming of grief after the loss.

   Real progress lay in the overcoming of obstacles that had stalled the project for years.

   Similarconquest, mastery, defeat

   Note

   The noun has a long history and a philosophical second career. Malory already uses it in Le Morte Darthur (1485). Because it is countable, it can take a plural. Daniel Conway's Nietzsche and the Political (2005) speaks of "painful self-overcomings," a compound that suits that line of thought. In everyday prose it usually comes framed by the and of, as in the overcoming of fear.

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