Word.ws English Dictionary

croaking

croaking is the present participle and gerund of croak.

Meaning of croak

Verb

croak (third-person singular simple present croaks, present participle croaking, simple past and past participle croaked)

  1. (intransitive) To make a croak sound.
  2. (transitive) To utter in a low, hoarse voice.
    • The raven himself is hoarse, / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan.c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  3. (intransitive, toad, raven, or various other birds or animals) To make its vocal sound.
  4. (intransitive, slang) To die.
    • “I would like to understand before I croak. I would like to understand, and then I’m perfectly fine to shuffle off my mortal coil.”2026, Sebastian Mallaby, “Introduction”, in The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, Penguin, →ISBN
  5. (slang, transitive) To kill.
    • He'd seen my face, so I had to croak him.
  6. To complain; especially, to grumble; to forebode evil; to utter complaints or forebodings habitually.
    • Marat […] croaks with such reasonableness.1837, Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, (please specify the book or page number)

See all 11 meanings of croak

Noun

croaking (plural croakings)

  1. The sound of something that croaks.
    • the croakings of frogs from the nearby pond
    • We heard the peculiar note of the woodcock, which resembles the repeated croaking of the frog[.]1886, Peter Christen Asbjø￵rnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 85

Forms of croaking

pluralcroakings

Phrases with croaking

Questions about croaking

What does croaking mean?
Croaking means the sound of something that croaks.
What is croaking the present participle and gerund of?
Croaking is the present participle and gerund of croak.
What part of speech is croaking?
Croaking is a noun.
What is the plural of croaking?
The plural of croaking is croakings.

Words near croaking in the dictionary

  1. croakie
  2. croakier
  3. croakiest
  4. croakily
  5. croakiness
  6. croaking
  7. croaking gourami
  8. croaking gouramis
  9. croakingly
  10. croakings
  11. croakless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: croaking (page history and authors); croak (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-croaking.wav.

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