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say it: LAHYT-ning
lightning is a noun meaning "abrupt electric discharge from cloud to cloud or from cloud to earth accompanied by the emission of light". It is pronounced /ˈlaɪtnɪŋ/ — LAHYT-ning. It carries 2 recorded senses.
abrupt electric discharge from cloud to cloud or from cloud to earth accompanied by the emission of light
the flash of light that accompanies an electric discharge in the atmosphere (or something resembling such a flash); can scintillate for a second or more
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for lightning come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.