Word.ws English Dictionary

cuckooing

cuckooing noun: the call of a cuckoo. Also the present participle and gerund of cuckoo.

Noun

cuckooing (countable and uncountable, plural cuckooings)

  1. The call of a cuckoo.
    • […] the mistaken idea that wagtails and hedge-warblers feed the young cuckoos they bring up, long after they leave the nest, whenever they hear their cuckooing, […]1882, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
  2. (UK) A form of crime in which the home of a vulnerable person is taken over by a criminal gang and used as a base for their activities.
    • The specified criminal activity includes the types of criminal activity that cuckooing is typically used to facilitate, for example, drugs offences, sexual offences and offensive weapons offences.2025 February 25, “Crime and Policing Bill: Child criminal exploitation and 'cuckooing' factsheet”, in Home Office, Ministry of Justice (United Kingdom)

Also used as

cuckooing is also the present participle and gerund of cuckoo.

Forms of cuckooing

pluralcuckooings

Origin of cuckooing

The UK sense is by analogy from the bird's practice of brood parasitism.

Questions about cuckooing

What does cuckooing mean?
Cuckooing means the call of a cuckoo.
What part of speech is cuckooing?
Cuckooing is a noun.
What is the plural of cuckooing?
The plural of cuckooing is cuckooings.

Words near cuckooing in the dictionary

  1. cuckoobud
  2. cuckoobuds
  3. cuckooed
  4. cuckooflower
  5. cuckooflowers
  6. cuckooing
  7. cuckooings
  8. cuckooish
  9. cuckoolike
  10. cuckooness
  11. cuckoopint

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cuckooing (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: “cuckooing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cuckooing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.