Rocketing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Moving or increasing very quickly, often in a sudden and steep upward direction
2. Experiencing a swift and significant upward change in value or level
3. Increasing at a fast pace, typically describing rapid growth or escalation

Etymology: The verb "rocket" comes from a spinning tool. Its ancestor was a distaff, the staff onto which flax fibres were loosely tied for spinning thread. Italian turned this into "rocchetta", a little bobbin, and the name then passed to a rocket for the way the thing shoots off a trail of fire, much as a bobbin unwinds its thread. The link to the spinning tool is preserved in the word "fuselage", which comes from Latin "fusus", meaning spindle, and once described the body of an aircraft by the same kind of metaphor. The verb's sense of rising very fast follows from the firework and missile senses, so the motion of rising is what has been carried over from the fire-trailing device. The spinning-tool origin is what shows how far the word has travelled from its starting point. A separate word, borrowed from French "roquette", is the name of the leafy salad plant, which descends from Latin "eruca". That word is a different branch and should not be confused with the spinning sense above.

Synonyms: soaring, skyrocketing, rising

Antonyms: falling, declining