widening

Pluralwidenings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of widen.

   The gap between the two leading teams kept widening throughout the season.

   Engineers are widening the canal so larger ships can pass through.

   Note

   The participle carries both halves of widen. Things can widen by themselves (the gap kept widening), and people can widen things (engineers are widening the canal). Programmers have a use of their own: widening a value means converting it to a data type that holds a larger range. As a gerund it takes a direct object, as in widening the road, unlike the noun, which needs "of."

2. 2
   adjective

   Becoming steadily wider, or growing farther apart from one another.

   The widening income gap has become a central issue in the election.

   Surveyors mapped the widening fissure running along the cliff edge.

   Similarincreasing

   Oppositenarrowing, shrinking

   Note

   Yeats gave this adjective its most quoted line, "the widening gyre" of The Second Coming (1920), a spiral that keeps opening outward. In ordinary prose it usually comes before nouns of distance or difference: a widening gap, rift or fissure. It is not comparable, so it does not take "more" or "most." Something is either widening or it is not, although "steadily" or "rapidly" can say how fast.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act or process of making something wider, or of growing wider.

   The widening of the canal allowed larger vessels to reach the port.

   Critics blamed the policy for the widening of social inequality.

   Similarbroadening, expansion, enlargement

   Oppositenarrowing

   Note

   Unlike the adjective, this noun can be counted, so a road may undergo several widenings. It usually takes its object in an of-phrase: the widening of an embankment, of a canal. Modern Railways uses it in 1962 for civil-engineering work on track and earthworks. Stevenson's Olalla (1887) shows the bodily use, "a widening of the nostrils," where nothing is built and something simply opens.

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