ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Bleaching

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Pronunciation /ˈbliːt͡ʃɪŋ/ · Part of speech verb

Quick meaning: Bleaching is a verb meaning present participle and gerund of bleach.

Meaning

present participle and gerund of bleach.

More Meanings

  1. The process of removing stains or of whitening fabrics, especially by the use of chemical agents.
  2. (linguistics) The loss or removal of part of the (semantic, grammatical, etc) content or a word or morpheme.

Example Sentences

Grammaticalization is often associated with 'semantic bleaching', and this 'bleaching' is the result of reanalysis […] But there is no evidence that the bleaching of the meaning of do played any role in the causation of this sequence of events.
In the development of the prepositional phrase, which did not exist in PIE, one can see a grammaticalization based on a double bleaching. […] Many of these combinations are achieved by lexical bleaching of the grammatical element and grammatical bleaching of the lexical element, as in the prepositional phrases in (11). (11) French English en auto by car

Word Forms

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include decolor, decolorize, whitener, whitening, blanching, whitewash.

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Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.