Word.ws English Dictionary

cruelling

cruelling is the present participle and gerund of cruel.

Meaning of cruel

Verb

cruel (third-person singular simple present cruels, present participle (US) crueling or (UK) cruelling, simple past and past participle (US) crueled or (UK) cruelled)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand) To spoil or ruin (one's chance of success)
    • What cruelled him was that Imperial Hotel contract.1937, Vance Palmer, Legend for Sanderson, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, page 226
  2. (Australia, ambitransitive) To violently provoke (a child) in the belief that this will make them more assertive.
    • Violence is apparently introduced early by the practice of "cruelling": children even in their first months are physically punished and then encouraged to seek retribution by punishing the punisher.2007, Stewart Motha, “Reconciliation as Domination”, in Scott Veitch, editor, Law and the Politics of Reconciliation, Routledge, published 2016, page 83

See all 6 meanings of cruel

Questions about cruelling

What is cruelling the present participle and gerund of?
Cruelling is the present participle and gerund of cruel.

Words near cruelling in the dictionary

  1. Cruellas
  2. cruelled
  3. crueller
  4. cruellest
  5. cruellie
  6. cruelling
  7. cruells
  8. cruelltie
  9. cruellties
  10. cruellty
  11. cruelly

Source and license

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