weakening

Pluralweakenings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A loss of strength, or the process by which something gradually becomes less strong.

   The currency's weakening against the dollar alarmed investors.

   A gradual weakening of public trust followed the scandal.

   Similardecline, deterioration, erosion, fall, slide

   Oppositestrengthening, recovery, rise

   Note

   The noun works both as a mass noun and as a count noun. As a process it usually appears as a weakening of something (a gradual weakening of trust). The plural counts separate acts. Charles Dickens, in Household Words (1855), writes of a performer's weakenings and damagings of her own effects. These are the specific touches by which she undercut herself, not a general decline.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of weaken.

   Economists warned that the recovery was weakening.

   The patient's pulse kept weakening through the night.

   Note

   Both directions of weaken survive in this form. Intransitively, something is weakening on its own (the recovery was weakening). Transitively, something is weakening something else (the drought is weakening the crops). As a gerund it still behaves like a verb and takes a direct object, as in weakening the dollar. the noun for lost strength, by contrast, needs of and can be counted: a weakening of the dollar, several weakenings.

   Months of drought are weakening the crops.

   Weakening the dollar was never the government's aim.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A structural principle of mathematical logic allowing the hypotheses of any derived statement to be freely extended with additional assumptions.

   Weakening allows a derivation to carry premises it never actually invokes.

   In the sequent calculus, weakening adds a formula to one side without affecting validity.

   Note

   In the sequent calculus it is stated as a rule. The rule adds an arbitrary formula to the antecedent, or on the right to the succedent, without disturbing what has been proved. Giving it up is what marks the substructural logics: linear logic and relevance logic both reject it, so an assumption cannot sit idle. The ordinary sense survives in the name, since a conclusion resting on more premises claims less.

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