cowering

cowering is the present participle and gerund of cower.

Meaning of cower

cower (third-person singular simple present cowers, present participle cowering, simple past and past participle cowered)

(intransitive) To crouch or cringe, or to avoid or shy away from something, in fear.
- He'd be useless in war. He'd just cower in his bunker until the enemy came in and shot him, or until the war was over.
(archaic, intransitive) To crouch in general.
- Some sterner virtues o’er the mountain’s breast
  May sit, like falcons, cowering on the nest1764, Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller
(transitive) To cause to cower; to frighten into submission.
- This done, their doubts will vanish, and they will stand confronted by an object lesson which must have the effect either to arouse them to a determination to banish despotism from the land, or cower them into submission and servitude.1895, Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industry of Kansas
(figuratively, intransitive) To be a coward; to hide away or refuse to face opposition due to fear.

cower (third-person singular simple present cowers, present participle cowering, simple past and past participle cowered)

What is cowering the present participle and gerund of?: Cowering is the present participle and gerund of cower.

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