engrailing

engrailing is the present participle and gerund of engrail.

Meaning of engrail

engrail (third-person singular simple present engrails, present participle engrailing, simple past and past participle engrailed)

(transitive) To make rough.
(intransitive) To form an edging or border; to run in curved or indented lines.
- Fine gold engrail'd adorns the figur'd floora. 1718, Thomas Parnell, Solomon

engrail (third-person singular simple present engrails, present participle engrailing, simple past and past participle engrailed)

(transitive) To variegate or spot, as with hail.
- a caldron new engrailed with twenty hues[1611?], Homer, “(please specify |book=I to XXIV)”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. […], London: […] Nathaniell Butter, →OCLC; republished as The Iliads of Homer...
(archaic, transitive) To indent with small curves.
- He crossed through the high grass and went up the slope, climbing with handholds in the new turf until he gained the crest and turned to look down on the river and the city beyond, casting a gray glance along that varied world, the pieced plowland, the houses, the odd grady of the small metropolis...1979, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, Random House, page 120

What is engrailing the present participle and gerund of?: Engrailing is the present participle and gerund of engrail.

Adapted from Wiktionary: engrailing (page history and authors); engrail (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: 2026-09-02

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