Word.ws English Dictionary

dousting

dousting is the present participle and gerund of doust.

Noun

dousting (countable and uncountable, plural doustings)

  1. (West-Country, obsolete) A beating, a dusting.
    • Bottrell, William (1880), Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall: “"For they'll get a mayn dousting when ever they coam."”
  2. (Cornwall, obsolete) A process for separating the dust from ore.
    • Lock, Charles George Warnford (1895), Economic mining: a practical handbook for the miner, the metallurgist and the merchant: “Dry winnowing or "dousting" is useful where the ore is more friable than the ganguo, eg the chalcopyrite and erubescite at the Capo copper-mines, Namaqualand.”

Meaning of doust

Verb

doust (third-person singular simple present dousts, present participle dousting, simple past and past participle dousted)

  1. (West-Country, obsolete) To extinguish, to destroy, to kill.
    • [...] the Duke of Dorset charged in the list with "not known, but supposed forty thousand per year" (charitable supposition) had when formerly in office only about 3 or £4,000, and has not now, nor when the black list was printed, any office whatever -- (Much tumult, and cries of "shame" and "doust...anonymous author (1831), The Bristol Job Nott; or, Labouring Man's Friend
  2. (West-Country, obsolete) To dust.
  3. (Cornwall, obsolete) To separate dust from ore.
    • Lock, Charles George Warnford (1895), Economic mining: a practical handbook for the miner, the metallurgist and the merchant: “The ore is first cobbed and classed into (a) prile, (b) best dredge, and (c) crusher dredge; a is finished product; c is crushed, jigged, and huddled; b is dousted, or...

See all 5 meanings of doust

Forms of dousting

pluraldoustings

Questions about dousting

What does dousting mean?
Dousting means a beating, a dusting.
What is dousting the present participle and gerund of?
Dousting is the present participle and gerund of doust.
What part of speech is dousting?
Dousting is a noun.
What is the plural of dousting?
The plural of dousting is doustings.

Words near dousting in the dictionary

  1. dousing-chocks
  2. dousings
  3. Dousland
  4. doust
  5. dousted
  6. dousting
  7. doustings
  8. Doustioni
  9. dousts
  10. dout
  11. doutar

Source and license

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