fracking

See also: Fracking

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈfɹækɪŋ/

• Audio (Australia):

  (file)

• Audio (Southern England):

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Etymology 1

From frack (“fracture”) +‎ -ing.

Alternative forms

• fraccing, fracing

Noun

fracking (usually uncountable, plural frackings)

1. (oil industry) Hydraulic fracturing.
   • 2010 July 25, Andrew Chung, “Quebec between a rock and a hard place on gas from shale”, in Toronto Star‎^[1], archived from the original on 28 July 2010, retrieved 26 July 2010:

     Still, environmentalists look to the U.S., where drilling with fracking is now a “megatrend” and where thousands of wells dot the landscape in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado. They worry about higher greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional natural gas—because of the energy used to get the gas—and water contamination.

   • 2014 November 9, Stanley Reed, “Britain Plans for Future of Shale Oil and Gas Industry”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN, archived from the original on 18 January 2022:

     There is strong resistance in much of Europe to fracking, the practice of forcing liquid and sand into wells to release trapped oil and gas. France has a ban on fracking, Germany has imposed a moratorium, and opposition has cropped up and sometimes delayed shale exploration in Eastern European countries like Romania and Poland.

   • 2015 July 25, Theodore Schleifer, “First on CNN: Billionaire brothers give Cruz super PAC $15 million”, in CNN‎^[3], archived from the original on 13 July 2026:

     Slowly, they marched toward a bigger role in the fracking industry. When competing Texas frackers looked to freeze the brothers out from the companies that distribute the sand needed to drill, the siblings opened their own sand quarry to thrive.

   • 2018 August 30, Bethany McLean, “How America's ‘most reckless’ billionaire created the fracking boom”, in The Guardian‎^[4], archived from the original on 11 October 2026:

     The fracking boom has been fuelled mostly by overheated investment capital, not by cash flow.

   • 2019 November 3, Robin McKie, “Shale gas fracking wasted ‘millions of taxpayers’ cash’, say scientists”, in The Guardian‎^[5], archived from the original on 12 October 2026:

     The criticisms were made in the wake of the government’s decision on Friday to impose a moratorium on fracking in the UK. A review published by the Oil and Gas Authority concluded it was impossible to predict the likelihood or scale of earthquakes triggered by fracking.

   • 2026 January 18, D Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, Peter Schmidt, “How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’?”, in The Guardian‎^[6], →ISSN, archived from the original on 12 October 2026:

     It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.

Derived terms

• antifracking, anti-fracking
• fracktivist
• human fracking
• hydrofracking

Descendants

• → German: Fracking
• → Korean: 프래킹 (peuraeking)
• → Spanish: fracking

Translations

hydraulic fracturing — see also hydraulic fracturing

• Czech: frakování n
• German: Fracking (de) n
• Spanish: fracking m

Etymology 2

From frack +‎ -ing.

Adjective

fracking (not comparable)

1. (slang, euphemistic, bowdlerization) Fucking.
   • 1991, James Whitehead, Joiner, →ISBN, page 79:

     He's a fracking hawk the likes of which Hopkins never imagined — he's a blue darter.

   • 2006 January, “Best Pentium Chipset”, in Maximum PC‎^[7], page 27:

     As we said before, will someone please agree on a fracking dual videocard standard?

   • 2007, Jose Armando Perez, Betrayed? An Unscheduled Rendezvous, page 68:

     It was a fracking nightmare.

Further reading

• hydraulic fracturing on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Spanish

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from English fracking.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈfɾakin/ [ˈfɾa.kĩn]
• Rhymes: -akin

Noun

fracking m (uncountable)

1. fracking
   • 2015 July 6, ““La batalla contra el ‘fracking’ no está perdida””, in El País‎^[8], archived from the original on 6 February 2017:

     El Estado de Nueva York ha prohibido el fracking, y Francia, y también Bulgaria.

     (please add an English translation of this quotation)

Usage notes

According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.