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say it: PIR-sing
piercing is an adjective meaning "having or demonstrating ability to recognize or draw fine distinctions". It is pronounced /ˈpɪɹsɪŋ/ — PIR-sing. It carries 2 recorded senses.
having or demonstrating ability to recognize or draw fine distinctions
“an acute observer of politics and politicians”
“incisive comments”
“icy knifelike reasoning”
“as sharp and incisive as the stroke of a fang”
“penetrating insight”
“frequent penetrative observations”
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 piercing 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.