vanishing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of vanish.

   The coastline kept vanishing behind thick sheets of rain.

   Vanishing without a trace, the two hikers left rescuers baffled for weeks.

   Note

   The participle carries every use of the verb, including two that are easy to miss. In mathematics a quantity that is vanishing is becoming equal to zero, not dropping out of sight. Used transitively, vanishing someone means making them disappear, that is, kidnapping them. That sinister causative is quite unlike hikers vanishing on their own. Placed before a noun with no verbal force, the form has become the adjective for fading away.

2. 2
   adjective

   Gradually disappearing or fading from sight until nothing remains.

   Like footprints on a beach being washed away by an incoming tide.

   Conservationists are racing to protect the region's vanishing wetlands.

   She watched the vanishing daylight with a quiet sense of loss.

   Similardwindling, diminishing, dying

   Oppositeincreasing, emerging

   Note

   A word for something leaving as you watch it, and it does not take degrees: a thing is vanishing or it is not, never more vanishing. Robert W. Chambers's The Younger Set (1907) catches a vanishing figure, one slipping out of view. Vanishing wetlands or vanishing daylight are instead dwindling where they are. Context tells you whether the thing is going away or wearing away.

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