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Allin

failing

verbnounprepositioncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈfeɪ.lɪŋ//

weakness; defect

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of failpresent participle and gerund of fail

    As we breasted the first summit, the precipitous mass of the Raven's Rock, towering some 250 ft. above the railway, looked grim and forbidding in the failing light, and distant Ben Wyves was shrouded in mist.

noun

  1. 1

    weakness; defect

    His worst failing is his temper.

    At the High Court in Aberdeen in September, NR pleaded guilty to a series of failings, including failing to tell the driver that it was unsafe to drive the train at the 75mph line speed.

preposition

  1. 1

    If what follows is not possible; without.

    A large proportion of the females employed in other firms are said to have signified their intention of going on strike, failing a settlement.

Forms

plural
failings
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).