cloying

/ˈklɔɪ.ɪŋ/

cloying is the present participle and gerund of cloy.

Adjective

cloying (comparative more cloying, superlative most cloying)

Unpleasantly excessive.
- The cloying fondness she displayed was what, in the end, drove me away.
- It was a cloying sense of deja vu attached to the team that finished seventh last season, 22 points off the top and drastically in need of some more dynamism.August 16 2014, Daniel Taylor, "Swansea upstage Manchester United in Louis van Gaal’s Premier League bow," guardian.co.uk
Excessively sweet.
- Oliver (Barry Keoghan): I don't normally like chocolate cake. / Elspeth (Rosamund Pike): Yes, it can be cloying, can't it?2023, Emerald Fennell, 1:38:29 from the start, in Saltburn
Synonyms:

syrupy, treacly, oversweet, saccharine

cloy (third-person singular simple present cloys, present participle cloying, simple past and past participle cloyed)

(transitive) To fill up or choke up; to stop up.

Synonyms:

block, block up, choke, fill, fill up, stop up, stuff, stuff up
(transitive) To clog, to glut, or satisfy, as the appetite; to satiate.

Synonyms:

fill up, glut, gorge, sate, satiate, satisfy, stodge, stuff, stuff up
(transitive) To fill to loathing; to surfeit.
- Now all this was very fine, but not at all in keeping with the Celebrity's character as I had come to conceive it. The idea that adulation ever cloyed on him was ludicrous in itself. In fact I thought the whole story fishy, and came very near to saying so.1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter III, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC
Synonyms:

jade, nauseate, pall, sicken, surfeit

comparative	more cloying
superlative	most cloying

By surface analysis, cloy + -ing.

What does cloying mean?: Cloying means unpleasantly excessive.
What is cloying the present participle and gerund of?: Cloying is the present participle and gerund of cloy.
What part of speech is cloying?: Cloying is an adjective.
How do you pronounce cloying?: Cloying is pronounced /ˈklɔɪ.ɪŋ/.

Adapted from Wiktionary: cloying (page history and authors); cloy (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-cloying.oga.

Cite this entry: “cloying.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cloying. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.