passing

1. 1.

   lasting a very short time

   “the ephemeral joys of childhood”

   “a passing fancy”

   “youth's transient beauty”

   “love is transitory but it is eternal”

   “fugacious blossoms”

   Synonymsephemeralshort-livedtransienttransitoryfugacious

   Similarimpermanent
2. 2.

   of advancing the ball by throwing it

   “a team with a good passing attack”

   “a pass play”

   Synonymspass

   Antonymsrunning

   football

3. 3.

   allowing you to pass (e.g., an examination or inspection) satisfactorily

   “a passing grade”

   Similarsatisfactory
4. 4.

   hasty and without attention to detail; not thorough

   “a casual (or cursory) inspection failed to reveal the house's structural flaws”

   “a passing glance”

   “perfunctory courtesy”

   “In his paper, he showed a very superficial understanding of psychoanalytic theory”

   Synonymscasualcursoryperfunctorysuperficial

   Similarcareless

1. 1.

   to an extraordinary degree

   “she was a surpassingly beautiful woman”

   “I will mention only one particular aspect of the current mess because ... this one is surely something new and passing strange”

   Synonymssurpassingly

Other forms of passing

plural

passings·

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.

Questions about passing

What does passing mean?

passing means "(American football) a play that involves one player throwing the ball to a teammate". That is the primary sense; the word has 12 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in passing?

passing has 2 syllables: pas-sing. The stress falls on "pas". In IPA it is /ˈpæsɪŋ/.

What is another word for passing?

Close synonyms include pass, passing play, passing game, loss, departure. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of passing?

The recorded antonyms are failing, running.

Is passing a common word?

passing is banded "Common" — everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with passing?

1 word rhymes with passing. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.