tightening

Pluraltightenings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act or process of making something tighter or more firmly fixed.

   The tightening of credit conditions slowed business borrowing.

   Engineers recommended a gradual tightening of each bolt to spread the load evenly.

   Similarrestriction, constriction

   Oppositeloosening, easing, relaxation

   Note

   As a noun it can be counted. Separate rounds of austerity become fiscal tightenings, in the plural, as in Steven R. Weisman's "I.M.F. Faces a Question of Identity" (2007). The usual frame is a tightening of something, such as credit, a bolt or a policy, and its economic use borrows directly from the verb's financial sense of making money harder to obtain.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of tighten.

   The central bank is tightening monetary policy to curb inflation.

   He kept tightening the clamp until the boards held firm.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. It is the progressive participle (the bank is tightening) and the gerund (tightening the clamp took an hour). It keeps both of the verb's patterns: transitive when someone tightens something, intransitive when a rope or grip simply tightens on its own. In finance it carries a central banker's meaning, making money harder to borrow, often by raising short-term interest rates.

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