Word.ws English Dictionary

appling

appling is the present participle and gerund of apple.

Meaning of apple

Verb

apple (third-person singular simple present apples, present participle appling, simple past and past participle appled)

  1. (transitive) To make (something) appear like an apple (noun sense 1.1).
    • To choose responsibly, our active citizen must know what is being offered, much of this knowledge being filtered through appearance: things must look what they are supposed to be. Apples must look like applies. One might say they have to be appled-up; varieties are selected for marketing which have...1992, Marilyn Strathern, “Enterprising Kinship: Consumer Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies”, in Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive...
  2. (intransitive) To become like an apple.
    • He glanced at me, his cheeks appled in the impish grin I was learning to recognise as the clever under-side of his broad and gentle smile.2003, Gregory David Roberts, chapter 1, in Shantaram, London: Hachette Digital, published 2012, →ISBN, part 1
  3. (UK, dialectal, intransitive, rare) To collect fir-cones.
  4. (dialectal, intransitive, obsolete except UK) Of a flower bud or vegetable (especially a root vegetable): to grow into the shape of an apple.
    • As for Scolymus [possibly type of artichoke?], it differeth from the reſt of theſe Thiſtles herein, That the root, if it be ſodden, it is good to be eaten: beſides, it hath a ſtraunge nature, for all the ſort of them during the Summer throughout, never reſt and give over, but either they floure, or...1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “[Book XXI.] Of Carduus, and Ixine: Of Tribulus and Anchusa.”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The...

See all 25 meanings of apple

Proper noun capitalized: Appling

Appling

  1. A surname.
  2. An unincorporated community and former city, the county seat of Columbia County, Georgia, United States, which lost its charter in 1995.

Words formed from appling

Phrases with appling

Questions about appling

What does appling mean?
Appling means a surname.
What is appling the present participle and gerund of?
Appling is the present participle and gerund of apple.
What part of speech is appling?
Appling is a proper noun.

Words near appling in the dictionary

  1. appliest
  2. applieth
  3. appliment
  4. appliments
  5. Applin
  6. appling
  7. Appling County
  8. appling up
  9. Applins
  10. applique
  11. appliqued

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: appling (page history and authors); Appling (page history and authors); apple (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: “appling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/appling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.