culling
/ˈkʌlɪŋ/
culling is the present participle and gerund of cull.
Noun
culling (countable and uncountable, plural cullings)
- The act by which things are culled; the process of selecting for acceptance or removal.
- It is he who has done everything the club have asked of him since his arrival, including overseeing the brutal culling of many of the club's legends - Luis Suarez was thrown away in a phone call which, by all accounts, lasted less than 90 seconds.2021 September 22, Guillem Balagué, “Barcelona: The toxic battle ripping apart a European giant”, in BBC Sport
- Anything separated or selected from a mass.
- The theft of personal possessions from a carriage during a horse race.
- Culling is performed during races by stepping up on a carriage during the time the horses are coming in, and snatching reticules, silk bags, &c., from the seats of the carriage, the attention of the ladies being drawn to the winning horse.1875, Snowden's Police Officers and Constables' Guide, page 113
Meaning of cull
Verb
cull (third-person singular simple present culls, present participle culling, simple past and past participle culled)
- To pick or take someone or something (from a larger group).
- 1984, cover star: JOE DALLESANDRO culled from Andy Warhol's FLESH — anonymous; sleeve notes from The Smiths' eponymous album
- Synonyms:
- cherry-pick
- To gather, collect.
- [T]he yellowbanded bees, / Through half-open lattices / Coming in the scented breeze, / Fed thee, a child, lying alone, / With whitest honey in fairy gardens culled— […]1832 December (indicated as 1833), Alfred Tennyson, “Eleanore”, in Poems, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 26
- To select (animals, plants, etc) from a group and then kill (them) in order to reduce the numbers of the group in a controlled manner.
- […] and tropical ash (81 percent of trees culled). Excessive lean, the second major culling factor, accounted for […] 13 percent of the tropical ash cull trees, and […]1970, USDA Forest Service Research Paper PSW, issues 66-77, page 3
- To kill (an animal, person, etc) for any reason.
- Berzin was then replaced by Stiepan Garanin, who was culled for being a 'Japanese spy' (although the uneducated Garanin pleaded to his torturers that he had never even heard of Japan); Garanin was then replaced by Andrei Vyshnyevtsky, who was culled for being insufficiently murderous; Vyshnyevtsky...2002, Stephen Barber, Annihilation Zones: Far East Atrocities of the 20th Century, page 106
- To lay off in order to reduce the numbers of; get rid of.
- The company culled more employees this month.
- To selectively not render or process certain objects, such as polygons.
- back-face culling
Forms of culling
| plural | cullings |
|---|
Words formed from culling
Words that rhyme with culling
Questions about culling
- What does culling mean?
- Culling means the act by which things are culled; the process of selecting for acceptance or removal.
- What is culling the present participle and gerund of?
- Culling is the present participle and gerund of cull.
- What part of speech is culling?
- Culling is a noun.
- How do you pronounce culling?
- Culling is pronounced /ˈkʌlɪŋ/.
- What is the plural of culling?
- The plural of culling is cullings.
Words near culling in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: culling (page history and authors); cull (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:
Cite this entry: “culling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/culling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.