cooing

/ˈkuːɪŋ/

cooing is the present participle and gerund of coo.

Noun

cooing (plural cooings)

A coo; a cooing sound.
A stage in the development of child language after crying and before babbling; the baby is able to control their sounds but tongue muscles are not well developed.

coo (third-person singular simple present coos, present participle cooing, simple past and past participle cooed)

(ambitransitive) To make a soft murmuring sound, similar to a dove or pigeon.
- No birds, except as birds of paſſage, flew, / No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo.1763, C[harles] Churchill, The Prophecy of Famine. A Scots Pastoral, 2nd edition, London: Printed for the author, and sold by G. Kearsly, in Ludgate-street, →OCLC, page 15
(intransitive) To speak in an admiring fashion, to be enthusiastic about.
- They were too busy cooing over the baby and his parents were too busy cooing over each other.2013, Nicola Cornick, chapter 14, in One Night with the Laird (Harlequin HQN Historical Romance), Don Mills, Ont.: Harlequin HQN, →ISBN

plural	cooings

What does cooing mean?: Cooing means a coo; a cooing sound.
What is cooing the present participle and gerund of?: Cooing is the present participle and gerund of coo.
What part of speech is cooing?: Cooing is a noun.
How do you pronounce cooing?: Cooing is pronounced /ˈkuːɪŋ/.
What is the plural of cooing?: The plural of cooing is cooings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: cooing (page history and authors); coo (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

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