Word.ws English Dictionary

a-building

a-building adverb: being built or under construction, as a structure or a vessel.

Adverb

a-building (not comparable)

  1. Being built or under construction, as a structure or a vessel.
    • This talk brought us up to the house that was a-building, not a large one, which stood at the end of a beautiful orchard surrounded by an old stone wall.1890, William Morris, chapter XXVI, in News from Nowhere
    • "Of these nineteen ships a-building no more than two can take the water before a month be past, and but seven more ere six months' time, push we never so mightily the work."1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, chapter 141, in The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC

Forms of a-building

alternative formabuilding

Origin of a-building

From a- (“in, on”) + building (“the act or process of building”).

Questions about a-building

What does a-building mean?
A-building means being built or under construction, as a structure or a vessel.
What part of speech is a-building?
A-building is an adverb.

Words near a-building in the dictionary

  1. A-bombed
  2. A-bomber
  3. A-bombers
  4. A-bombing
  5. A-bombs
  6. a-building
  7. a-burton
  8. a-buzz
  9. a-c
  10. a-cappella
  11. a-cappellas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: a-building (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “a-building.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/a-building. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.