PREVAILING

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does prevailing mean? 

• PREVAILING (adjective)
  The adjective PREVAILING has 1 sense:

1. most frequent or common

  Familiarity information: PREVAILING used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PREVAILING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Most frequent or common

Synonyms:

dominant; predominant; prevailing; prevalent; rife

Context example:

prevailing winds

Similar:

frequent (coming at short intervals or habitually)

 Context examples 

I have great hope of prevailing.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

WMO spokeswoman Claire Nullis says the warming conditions prevailing over both the Arctic and the Antarctic are very alarming.

(World Meteorological Org.: Arctic Warming Appears Irreversible, VOA)

Anxiety on Jane's behalf was another prevailing concern; and Mr. Darcy's explanation, by restoring Bingley to all her former good opinion, heightened the sense of what Jane had lost.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

“This makes the grains so sticky and cohesive that only heavy winds can move them. The prevailing winds aren’t strong enough to shape the dunes.”

('Electric Sands' Cover Titan, VOA News)

Therefore, if it had depended upon me to touch the prevailing chord among them with any skill, I should have made a poor hand of it.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The two prevailing theories include eruptions, which spread lava flows over a large area, or overturning waves of lava.

(Massive Lava Waves Detected on Solar System’s Most Volcanically Active Object, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

According to the prevailing cells type, three major variants can be distinguished: fibrillary astrocytoma, gemistocytic astrocytoma, and protoplasmic astrocytoma.

(Diffuse Astrocytoma, NCI Thesaurus/Adapted from WHO)

Now exposed on the mountain's slopes, each layer reveals a different era of Martian history and holds clues about the prevailing environment at the time.

(NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds an Ancient Oasis on Mars, NASA)

The team's findings overturn a prevailing model of evolution, which holds that the key criteria for animals' access to an island are its size and its distance from the colonizing animals' source territory.

(Fossil discovery adds to understanding of how geological changes affected evolution of mammalian life, National Science Foundation)

The results offer a different perspective from the prevailing view that high mountains are often responsible for altering atmospheric circulation.

(Six million years ago, atmospheric shifts led to increased diversity of grassland mammals, National Science Foundation)