stiffening

1. 1.

   the act of becoming stiff

   “stiffening his shoulders, he prepared to advance”

   Broaderprocedure
2. 2.

   the process of becoming stiff or rigid

   Synonymsrigidifyingrigidification

   Broadernatural process

   Narrowerrigor mortis

Other forms of stiffening

plural

stiffenings·

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 stiffening

What does stiffening mean?

stiffening means "the act of becoming stiff". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in stiffening?

stiffening has 3 syllables: stif-fe-ning. The stress falls on "stif". In IPA it is /ˈstɪfənɪŋ/.

What is another word for stiffening?

Close synonyms include rigidifying, rigidification. 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.

Is stiffening a common word?

stiffening is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.