feathering

feathering is the present participle and gerund of feather.

Noun

feathering (countable and uncountable, plural featherings)

Plumage.
A feathered texture.
- The whole flower is very small; the tube is faintly marked with lilac lines; the petals are concave, the three outer white, marked with three lines, the middle one narrow, without featherings, the outer ones broader, and neatly feathered […]1834, Paxton's Magazine of Botany, and Register of Flowering Plants
The fitting of feathers to arrows.
An arrangement of small arcs or foils separated by projecting cusps, frequently forming the feather-like ornament on the inner mouldings of arches.
Visible offshoots of the trails of ink written on overly absorbent paper.

feather (third-person singular simple present feathers, present participle feathering, simple past and past participle feathered)

To cover or furnish with feathers; (when of an arrow) to fletch.
- An Eagle had the ill Hap to be Struck with an Arrow Feather'd from her own Wing.1692, Roger L’Estrange, “ (please specify the fable number.) (please specify the name of the fable.)”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists: […], London: […] R[ichard] Sare, […], →OCLC
To adorn, as if with feathers; to fringe.
- A few birches and oaks still feathered the narrow ravines, or occupied in dwarf clusters the hollow plains of the moor.1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter II, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume II (Old Mortality), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]...
To arrange in the manner or appearance of feathers.
- The stylist feathered my hair.
(ambitransitive) To rotate the oars while they are out of the water to reduce wind resistance.
To streamline the blades of an aircraft's propeller by rotating them perpendicular to the axis of the propeller when the engine is shut down so that the propeller does not windmill during flight.
- After striking the bird, the pilot feathered the damaged left engine’s propeller.
To finely shave or bevel an edge.

plural	featherings

What does feathering mean?: Feathering means plumage.
What is feathering the present participle and gerund of?: Feathering is the present participle and gerund of feather.
What part of speech is feathering?: Feathering is a noun.
What is the plural of feathering?: The plural of feathering is featherings.

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