Word.ws English Dictionary

bellying out

bellying out is the present participle and gerund of belly out.

Meaning of belly out

Verb

belly out (third-person singular simple present bellies out, present participle bellying out, simple past and past participle bellied out)

  1. (intransitive) To bulge or billow outward.
    • […] the Shape of the Hive is recommended to be like an Egg, with one End cut off, as People order it when they are about to eat it, it may consist of twelve Straw-Wreaths or Rowls, according to the Bigness of it; the three first Rowls of one Magnitude, and about a Foot or somewhat more in Diameter...1733, The Dublin Society, chapter 2, in Instructions for Managing Bees, page 12
  2. (transitive) To cause to bulge or billow outward.
    • The scene is changed and Fortune’s gale
      Shall belly out each prosperous sail.1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Happiness” (written in 1791), lines 30-31

Questions about bellying out

What is bellying out the present participle and gerund of?
Bellying out is the present participle and gerund of belly out.

Words near bellying out in the dictionary

  1. bellyful
  2. bellyfuls
  3. bellyhold
  4. bellyholds
  5. bellying
  6. bellying out
  7. bellying up
  8. bellying up to the bar
  9. bellyings
  10. bellyland
  11. bellylaugh

Source and license

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