Word.ws English Dictionary

beetling

beetling is the present participle and gerund of beetle.

Noun

beetling (plural beetlings)

  1. The process by which fabrics, etc. are beetled, or beaten with a mallet.
  2. A jutting or protrusion.
    • These gave place at last to things less and less unspeakable; till at last, from beneath the very brow of the beetlings and the menacings of the Terror Stone came the audible words of Pierre:—1852, Herman Melville, Pierre; or The Ambiguities

Meaning of beetle

Verb (1)

beetle (third-person singular simple present beetles, present participle beetling, simple past and past participle beetled)

  1. To move (away) quickly, to scurry away.
    • He beetled off on his vacation.

Verb (2)

beetle (third-person singular simple present beetles, present participle beetling, simple past and past participle beetled)

  1. (ambitransitive) To loom over; to extend or jut (above).
    • The heavy chimney beetled over the thatched roof.

Verb (3)

beetle (third-person singular simple present beetles, present participle beetling, simple past and past participle beetled)

  1. To beat with a heavy mallet.
  2. To finish by subjecting to a hammering process in a beetle or beetling machine.
    • to beetle cotton goods

See all 10 meanings of beetle

Adjective

beetling (not comparable)

  1. Jutting or protruding, especially of a person's brows.
    • As I anticipated, we had passed right through the precipice, and were now on the farther side, and immediately beneath its beetling face.1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
    • The beetling head of the cliff projected over the cane-brake.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

Forms of beetling

pluralbeetlings

Questions about beetling

What does beetling mean?
Beetling means the process by which fabrics, etc. are beetled, or beaten with a mallet.
What is beetling the present participle and gerund of?
Beetling is the present participle and gerund of beetle.
What part of speech is beetling?
Beetling can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of beetling?
The plural of beetling is beetlings.

Words near beetling in the dictionary

  1. beetlers
  2. beetles
  3. beetleskin
  4. beetleskins
  5. beetleweed
  6. beetling
  7. beetlings
  8. beetloaf
  9. beetly
  10. Beeton
  11. Beetonian

Source and license

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