All 13 Uses of

phase
in
Light in August

But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty: he might have seen himself as in numberless avatars, in silence, doomed with motion, driven by the courage of flagged and spurred despair; by the despair of courage whose opportunities had to be flagged and spurred.†
Chpt 10

phases = periods of time or stages during the development of something

It is as though he desires to see his native earth in all its phases for the first or the last time.†
Chpt 14 *

A spiritual privacy so long intact that its own instinct for preservation had immolated it, its physical phase the strength and fortitude of a man.†
Chpt 11

As time went on and the novelty of the second phase began to wear off and become habit, he would stand in the kitchen door and look out across the dusk and see, perhaps with foreboding and premonition, the savage and lonely street which he had chosen of his own will, waiting for him, thinking This is not my life.†
Chpt 12

Now it would be that still, cold, contained figure of the first phase who, even though lost and damned, remained somehow impervious and impregnable; then it would be the other, the second one, who in furious denial of that impregnability strove to drown in the black abyss of its own creating that physical purity which had been preserved too long now even to be lost.†
Chpt 12

It merged into the third phase so gradually that he could not have said where one stopped and the other began: It was summer becoming fall, with already, like shadows before a weltering sun, the chill and implacable import of autumn cast ahead upon summer; something of dying summer spurting again like a dying coal, in the fall.†
Chpt 12

Perhaps in the phase in which she now was she could not have been convinced, would not have listened to proof, would not have cared.†
Chpt 12

During the first phase it had been as though he were outside a house where snow was on the ground, trying to get into the house; during the second phase he was at the bottom of a pit in the hot wild darkness; now he was in the middle of a plain where there was no house, not even snow, not even wind.†
Chpt 12

During the first phase it had been as though he were outside a house where snow was on the ground, trying to get into the house; during the second phase he was at the bottom of a pit in the hot wild darkness; now he was in the middle of a plain where there was no house, not even snow, not even wind.†
Chpt 12

Definitions:

(1) (phase as in: a critical phase)
a period of time or a stage during the development of something
(2) (phase as in: she's going through a phase)
a period of time when someone exhibits unusual behavior
(3) (phase as in: phased out over three years)
make a change gradually (phase in = gradually add; phase out = gradually removed)
(4) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

More specialized and less common senses of the word are found in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and zoology. Consult a comprehensive dictionary if you wish to see those. All senses have to do with stages or periods of time.