Approaching
adj, adv, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The act of coming closer; an approach.
"But we can also take a more analytical attitude to these displays, interpreting the movements as no more than approachings, touchings, and departings with no implication that one shape caused the other to move."
- 2 the act of drawing spatially closer to something wordnet
- 3 the temporal property of becoming nearer in time wordnet
- 4 the event of one object coming closer to another wordnet
- 1 present participle and gerund of approach form-of, gerund, participle, present
"The army was approaching from the north."
- 1 That approaches or approach. not-comparable
"the approaching armies"
- 1 of the relatively near future wordnet
- 1 Nearly. not-comparable
"The evacuation of approaching 200,000 people, along with reports of high radiation levels, of burning spent fuel, and apocalyptic footage of plumes of debris erupting from the stricken plant, will revive a question that seemed to have been retreating from global concerns: how safe is nuclear power?"
Example
More examples"As the plane was approaching turbulence, the pilot asked the passengers aboard the plane to fasten their seat belts."
Etymology
By surface analysis, approach + -ing.
More for "approaching"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.