asphyxiating

English

Etymology

By surface analysis, asphyxiate +‎ -ing.

Adjective

asphyxiating (comparative more asphyxiating, superlative most asphyxiating)

1. Causing asphyxiation; depriving living beings of the ability to breath.
   • 1949, Moses Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides:

     If one digs a deep pit and another comes and broadens it, and an ox falls into it and dies, the rule is as follows: If the ox dies as a result of the asphyxiating atmosphere of the pit, the second person is exempt because his action has rendered the atmosphere less asphyxiating. If, however, it dies as a result of concussion, he is liable since he has increased the likelihood that the pit will cause this damage.

   • 2014, George W. Holcomb, J. Patrick Murphy, Daniel J Ostlie, Ashcraft's Pediatric Surgery:

     Jeune syndrome, or asphyxiating chondrodystrophy, is an extreme form of mixed pectus excavtum/carinatum and is very rare.

   • 2015, Morgan J. Hurley, Eric R. Rosenbaum, Performance-Based Fire Safety Design, page 100:

     Most fire safety analyses will focus on asphyxiating gases (and generally just CO and CO2).

   • 2018, Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography: Volume II, page 249:

     To this it was answered —and, as it seemed to me, with force—that asphyxiating bombs might be used against towns for the destruction of vast numbers of non-combatants, including women and children, while torpedoes at sea are used only against the military and naval forces of the enemy.

2. Restrictive; stifling; preventing emotional or behavioral expression.
   • 2007, Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, page 126:

     For Kate, Dick and the theatre company represent a world of imagination, sensuality, and emotional freedom that her asphyxiating religion cannot accommodate.

   • 2010, Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet:

     This sharing of emotional resources generates symbiotic energy fields between players, which they engage according to their inherent forces, and not based on the asphyxiating conventions of gender exclusivity and monogamy.

   • 2011, Craig Harline, Sunday, page 134:

     But it was not a quiet of awe or joy they felt: for most people it was the sobering thought of returning to “another asphyxiating week.”

   • 2022, Helene Strauss, Wayward Feeling:

     This work finds expression also in ongoing struggles to survive the asphyxiating emotional cultures against which protesting students rose up – including against what Shose Kessi referred to as the stifling ways in which white feeling excludes and silences “under the guise of 'logical reasoned argument'."

   • 2023, Ana Estévez, Janire Momeñe, “Psychological, Family, and Behavioural Factors Associated with Emotional Dependence”, in Fulvia Prever, Gretchen Blycker, Laura Brandt, editor, Behavioural Addiction in Women:

     This, together with continous demands for displays of love, affection, and continuous contact makes them vulnerable to establishing pathological, asphyxiating, and unbalanced couple relationships (Castelló, 2005).

3. Overwhelming; breathtaking.
   • 2017, Daniel Whistler, Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian, page 8:

     But according to Gauchet's thesis, Christianity has proven to be 'a religion for departing from religion' (ibid. 4); the gradual emancipation from and death of God has trained and conditioned us Westerners to withstand the asphyxiating terror of freedom.

   • 2019, Jon Kofas, Phantom of Apocalypse: A Dystopian novel:

     Deeply buried emotional wounds were now on the surface; wounds manifesting themselves by the manner we were both breathing heavily, lest we pass out from asphyxiating emotional pain.

   • 2024, Nishant Gang, It Happens: Navigating Life's Unpredictable Journey, page 25:

     Asphyxiating arches catch the breath And numb the senses of all who sought the lost prize.

   • 2024, Siri Helle, The Emotion Trap:

     It might cause shame to know on an intellectual level that this asphyxiating fear is, in reality, irrational.

Derived terms

• asphyxiatingly

 

Verb

asphyxiating

1. present participle and gerund of asphyxiate
   • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

     To Edward […] he was terrible, nerve-inflaming, poisonously asphyxiating. He sat rocking himself in the late Mr. Churchill's swing chair, smoking and twaddling.