ROTTING

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does rotting mean? 

• ROTTING (noun)
  The noun ROTTING has 1 sense:

1. (biology) the process of decay caused by bacterial or fungal action

  Familiarity information: ROTTING used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ROTTING (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

(biology) the process of decay caused by bacterial or fungal action

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural processes

Synonyms:

breakdown; decomposition; putrefaction; rot; rotting

Hypernyms ("rotting" is a kind of...):

decay (the process of gradually becoming inferior)

Domain category:

biological science; biology (the science that studies living organisms)

Derivation:

rot (break down)

 Context examples 

A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

But it was Sarah’s fault, and may the curse of a broken man put a blight on her and set the blood rotting in her veins!

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

C. bifermentans is found in cases of gaseous gangrene and in rotting meat.

(Clostridium bifermentans, NCI Thesaurus)

These bacteria secrete a compound called "tunicamycin" to keep rival bacteria from reaching choice resources, like rotting plant material.

(Soil Bacterium Tapped for Penicillin Guard Duty, U.S. Department of Agriculture)

She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly away.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Those potatoes are rotting.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

He had entitled the story Adventure, and it was the apotheosis of adventure—not of the adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to royal culminations and lordly achievements.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)