chewing
chewing is the present participle and gerund of chew.
Noun
chewing (countable and uncountable, plural chewings)
- The act by which something is chewed on; mastication.
- And while the dog and the cat buses suffered considerable damage from the trapped animals' excretions, clawings, and chewings, the bus with the skunk was declared unsalvageable.2016, Jennifer Bramseth, Bourbon Springs Box Set: Volume II, Books 4-6
- The consumption of (the juice from) the khat plant.
- The consumption of loose leaf tobacco juice from tobacco plants by chewing leaves near the cheek.
Meaning of chew
Verb
chew (third-person singular simple present chews, present participle chewing, simple past chewed, past participle chewed or (rare) chewn)
- To crush with the teeth by repeated closing and opening of the jaws; done to food to soften it and break it down by the action of saliva before it is swallowed.
- Make sure to chew thoroughly, and don't talk with your mouth full!
- To grind, tear, or otherwise degrade or demolish something with teeth or as with teeth.
- He keeps his feed in steel drums to prevent the mice from chewing holes in the feed-sacks.
- The condition of something being torn or ground up mechanically.
- Avoiding Tape Chew. In the early days of the ADAT, the "V" blocks (two arms that thread the tape around the front of the head) could sometimes get out of alignment and "chew" the outside track […]1995, Keyboard, volume 21, numbers 7-12, page 138
- To think about something; to ponder; to chew over.
- The professor stood at the blackboard, chalk in hand, and chewed the question the student had asked.
- Synonyms:
- contemplate, ruminate, mull, muse, ponder
- To chew tobacco.
- To reduce cancer risk, it is best that you neither chew nor smoke.
Forms of chewing
| plural | chewings |
|---|
Origin of chewing
From Middle English chewynge, chewand, from Old English *ċēowende, from Proto-Germanic *kewwandz, present participle of Proto-Germanic *kewwaną (“to chew”), equivalent to chew + -ing.
From Middle English chewyng, chewynge, from Old English ċīwung, ċȳwung, ċēowung (“chewing”), equivalent to chew + -ing.
Words formed from chewing
Phrases with chewing
Questions about chewing
- What does chewing mean?
- Chewing means the act by which something is chewed on; mastication.
- What is chewing the present participle and gerund of?
- Chewing is the present participle and gerund of chew.
- What part of speech is chewing?
- Chewing is a noun.
- What is the plural of chewing?
- The plural of chewing is chewings.
Words near chewing in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: chewing (page history and authors); chew (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “chewing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chewing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.