Word.ws English Dictionary

colting

colting is the present participle and gerund of colt.

Meaning of colt

Verb

colt (third-person singular simple present colts, present participle colting, simple past and past participle colted)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To horse; to get with young.
    • Never talk on't: / She hath been colted by him.1611 April (first recorded performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Cymbeline”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard...
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To befool.
    • What a plague mean ye to colt me thus?c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
  3. (intransitive) To frisk or frolic like a colt; to act licentiously or wantonly.
    • They shook off their bridles and began to colt.1596 (date written; published 1633), Edmund Spenser, A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande […], Dublin: […] Societie of Stationers, […], →OCLC; republished as A View of the State of Ireland […]...
    Synonyms:
    harlotize
  4. (obsolete, slang, transitive) To haze (a new recruit), as by charging a new juryman a "fine" to be spent on alcoholic drink, or by striking the sole of his foot with a board, etc.
    • We watched our opportunity, seized him, and, laying him across a chest, we colted him with a boot-jack until we nearly killed him, he at the time suffering from numerous boils in the nates; and for all this he obtained no redress!1849, The Lancet, page 53

See all 17 meanings of colt

Questions about colting

What is colting the present participle and gerund of?
Colting is the present participle and gerund of colt.

Words near colting in the dictionary

  1. Coltfield
  2. Coltharp
  3. Coltharps
  4. colthood
  5. Colthrop
  6. colting
  7. coltish
  8. Coltishall
  9. coltishly
  10. coltishness
  11. coltivirus

Source and license

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