Word.ws English Dictionary

beleaguering

beleaguering is the present participle and gerund of beleaguer.

Meaning of beleaguer

Verb

beleaguer (third-person singular simple present beleaguers, present participle beleaguering, simple past and past participle beleaguered)

  1. To besiege; to surround with troops.
    • I have read in some old marvellous tale, / Some legend strange and vague, / That a midnight host of spectres pale / Beleaguered the walls of Prague. // Beside the Moldau's rushing stream, / With the wan moon overhead, / There stood, as in an awful dream, / The army of the dead.1838 October, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Beleaguered City”, in Voices of the Night, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1839, →OCLC, stanzas 1–2, page 22
    Synonyms:
    beset, belay, encircle, invest, lay siege to
  2. To vex, harass, or beset.
  3. To exhaust.

Questions about beleaguering

What is beleaguering the present participle and gerund of?
Beleaguering is the present participle and gerund of beleaguer.

Words near beleaguering in the dictionary

  1. beleads
  2. beleaguer
  3. beleaguered
  4. beleaguerer
  5. beleaguerers
  6. beleaguering
  7. beleaguerment
  8. beleaguerments
  9. beleaguers
  10. beleagure
  11. beleagured

Source and license

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