Word.ws English Dictionary

cavilling

cavilling is the present participle and gerund of cavil.

Meaning of cavil

Verb

cavil (third-person singular simple present cavils, present participle (US) caviling or (UK) cavilling, simple past and past participle (US) caviled or (UK) cavilled)

  1. (intransitive) To criticise for petty or frivolous reasons.
    • 'Tis love you cavil at: I am not Love.c. 1590–1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
    Synonyms:
    be hypercritical, nitpick, pettifog, split hairs

See all 2 meanings of cavil

Noun

cavilling (plural cavillings)

  1. cavillation
    • God's word suffers nothing from such captious queryings and cavillings as deface the pages of the modern destructive school.1864, Melancthon Williams Jacobus, Notes, critical and explanatory, on the book of Genesis, page iii

Forms of cavilling

pluralcavillings

Questions about cavilling

What does cavilling mean?
Cavilling means cavillation.
What is cavilling the present participle and gerund of?
Cavilling is the present participle and gerund of cavil.
What part of speech is cavilling?
Cavilling is a noun.
What is the plural of cavilling?
The plural of cavilling is cavillings.

Words near cavilling in the dictionary

  1. cavillation
  2. cavillations
  3. cavilled
  4. caviller
  5. cavillers
  6. cavilling
  7. cavillings
  8. cavillous
  9. cavils
  10. cavimorph
  11. cavimorphs

Source and license

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