Decrease in size, range, or extent

Usage examples of shrinking.

It drew inward, shrinking from the touch of the silk to avoid allergic reaction.

Shrinking himself, crying curses for the necessity, Braggen lashed their balked rumps with the ends of his reins and drove them to forsake their sound instincts.

The nine shrinking battalions left trails of crushed and bloodied grass as they crawled northwards and the crawl was threatening to come to a full halt when all that would be left of the division would be nine bands of survivors clustered round their precious colours.

With Mersing shrinking in the distance, Sumo put them on autopilot and Strachan convened a meeting in the cockpit.

I moved after Modred, though the room kept shrinking and expanding insanely, and sometimes Gawain was very far away and sometimes just out of reach, but two-dimensional, so that he seemed pressed between two pieces of glass, and his beautiful hair hanging down at an unconscious angle seemed afire like the river of stars, streaming and flowing like light.

While those mountains were shrinking I was growing, I was taking those soggy heaps and putting them inside me and getting bigger, and that abandoned churchyard where I buried the old musketoon in the rain, that mud was consecrated by me and nobody else.

His love had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed, by a merely human one.

The instinctive shrinking from death felt by man would, sooner or later, quite naturally suggest the idea that death was not an original feature in the divine plan of the world, but a retributive additional discord.

But the information was pleasantly echoed about, as the ranks of the Servi parted and an old man, with a face full of benignity, came forward, holding the hand of a boy with blue eyes and light hair, who walked timidly with him to the pulpit on the left, where the older man encouraged the shrinking disputant to mount the stair.

Unlike poor Saryon, who had shrunk within himself to the point of shrinking from sight altogether, the Bishop became bloated.

Chow arrived four months after I had my first shot of telomerase inhibitor, two months after my tumors started shrinking and I began to think I might have some kind of chance.

In this disorder of his nervous and mental condition, with a doubting conscience and a shrinking heart, is it any wonder that the terrors which lay before him at the gap in those bristling walls, should draw near, and, making sudden inroad upon his soul, overwhelm the government of a will worn out by the tortures of an unassured spirit?

What he worried about was any eventual convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere.

She likes this Bruxellois world, which gives her a sense of security, and has no regrets for the Police Judiciaire, from which she has inherited a revulsion to violence in any form, a shrinking of the skin, the fiercer because she had always taken such pains to master it.

For centuries after the departure, the Qeng Ho Net continued to report the progress of the Prince of Canberra, of his fleets growing and sometimes shrinking.