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Allin

improving

adjectiveverbattested in dialogue

  • //ɪmˈpɹuːvɪŋ//

That tends to improve someone or something (especially (dated) to educate or morally better a person).

adjective

  1. 1

    That tends to improve someone or something (especially (dated) to educate or morally better a person).

    […] nothing is so improving to the Temper as the Study of the Beauties, either of Poetry, Eloquence, Musick, or Painting.

    She was so overcome by the splendor of his achievement that she took him into the closet and selected a choice apple and delivered it to him, along with an improving lecture upon the added value and flavor a treat took to itself when it came without sin through virtuous effort.

    To boast mendaciously about one’s own gang and to slander and defame other gangs are acts everywhere officially regarded as creditable and even pious. It is as though our rulers, instead of merely tolerating prostitution, were to proclaim the brothel to be a place as sacred as the cathedral and as improving as the public library.

    “Nothing to do but keep the chin up and the upper lip as stiff as can be managed. I think I’ll go to bed with an improving book. […]”

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of improvepresent participle and gerund of improve

Forms

comparative
more improving
superlative
most improving
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).