melting

comparative more melting · superlative most melting

1. Which is melting, dissolving or liquefying.
2. Given over to strong emotion; tender; aroused; emotional, tearful.

   What guards the purity of melting maids, / In courtly balls, and midnight masquerades [...]?

   1714, Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”, in The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, volume I, London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintot, […], published 1717, →OCLC, canto I, page 125

3. That causes one to melt with emotion; able to make others feel tender and emotional.

   And he, Allada Khan, had decided that the child was not unlike himself - an unaggressive nose, and intelligent forehead, eyes both lively and melting.

   1956, Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 195

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of melt

plural meltings

1. The process of changing the state of a substance from solid to liquid by heating it past its melting point.

   Of all the transitions brought about on the Earth’s surface by temperature change, the melting of ice into water is the starkest. It is binary. And for the land beneath, the air above and the life around, it changes everything.

   2013 May 11, “The climate of Tibet: Pole-land”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8835, page 80

2. figurativelyThe act of softening or mitigating.