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Hydraulic fracturing is a technique in which a liquid is injected under high pressure into a well in order to create tiny fissures in the rock deep beneath the earth which then allow gas and oil to flow into the well. The term "hydraulic fracturing" is first known to have appeared in print in a 1948 issue of Oil & Gas Journal. A 1953 issue of the same journal also contains the earliest known print use of "fracking." The word fracking (sometimes spelled fraccing or fracing, particularly by those in the gas and oil industries) was created by shortening "fracturing." The addition of the "k" brings the word into conformity with the inflected forms of similar English words ending in a vowel plus "c," such as shellacking, panicking, and frolicking.
Examples of fracking in a Sentence
Steven Simon, Foreign Affairs, 9 Apr. 2024
Pumping a record 105 billion cubic feet per day (most of it from shale fracking), the U.S. has oodles of gas.
—Christopher Helman, Forbes, 28 Mar. 2024
Even in earlier days of oil and gas extraction in California, fracking was not widespread.
—Ari Plachta, Sacramento Bee, 13 Feb. 2024
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat, said New York doesn’t have much of an appetite for allowing fracking of any kind.
—Maysoon Khan, Quartz, 19 Mar. 2024
State law mandates that the entities who nominated the land for fracking and those that bid on the land must remain anonymous until the bidding process is complete.
—Samantha Hendrickson, Quartz, 26 Feb. 2024
Natural gas is used to heat homes and businesses, and is often produced in the United States through a technique known as fracking that has unlocked vast supplies underneath the ground.
—TIME, 29 Jan. 2024
In several State of the Union Messages, President Barack Obama lauded the spread of fracking, and his State Department set up a special bureau that spread the technology abroad.
—Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, 31 Oct. 2023
Environmental advocates and researchers believe fracking may impact water quality and emit air pollutants by releasing toxic chemicals.
—Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 4 Oct. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fracking.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near fracking
Cite this Entry
“Fracking.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fracking. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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