Word.ws English Dictionary

foraging

foraging is the present participle and gerund of forage.

Meaning of forage

Verb

forage (third-person singular simple present forages, present participle foraging, simple past and past participle foraged)

  1. To search for and gather food for animals, particularly cattle and horses.
    • The message said that the party intended to hunt and forage through this region, for a month or two, afore it went back into the Canadas.1841, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 8, in The Deerslayer
  2. To rampage through, gathering and destroying as one goes.
    • And your great-uncle's, Edward the Black Prince, / Who on the French ground play'd a tragedy, / Making defeat on the full power of France, / Whiles his most mighty father on a hill / Stood smiling to behold his lion's whelp / Forage in blood of French nobility.1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  3. To rummage.
    • Using the blankets for a basket, we sent up the books, instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed.1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, “The Cabin of the ‘Flying Scud’”, in The Wrecker, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, […], →OCLC, page 218
  4. Of an animal: to seek out and eat food.

See all 7 meanings of forage

Noun

foraging (countable and uncountable, plural foragings)

  1. The act of searching for food or other items.
    • “This suggests that most of the foraging that the bees do occurs very close to the hive,” study co-author Margarita López-Uribe, an associate professor of entomology at PSU, told CNN on Monday.2025 January 28, Jack Guy, “Tiny QR codes help scientists track bee movements”, in CNN

Forms of foraging

pluralforagings

Words formed from foraging

Questions about foraging

What does foraging mean?
Foraging means the act of searching for food or other items.
What is foraging the present participle and gerund of?
Foraging is the present participle and gerund of forage.
What part of speech is foraging?
Foraging is a noun.
What is the plural of foraging?
The plural of foraging is foragings.

Words near foraging in the dictionary

  1. foragement
  2. foragements
  3. forager
  4. foragers
  5. forages
  6. foraging
  7. foragings
  8. Foraker
  9. forakers
  10. foralite
  11. foralites

Source and license

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