Word.ws English Dictionary

glooming

glooming is the present participle and gerund of gloom.

Noun

glooming (plural gloomings)

  1. Twilight of morning or evening; the gloaming.
    • When the faint glooming in the sky / First lightened into day1835, Richard Chenevix Trench, To my God-Child, on the Day of his Baptism
    • [T]he balmy glooming, crescent-lit, / Spread the light haze along the river-shores, / And in the hollows; […]1842, Alfred Tennyson, “The Gardener’s Daughter; or, The Pictures”, in Poems. […], volume II, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 31
    Synonyms:
    crepuscule
  2. Gloomy behaviour; melancholy.
    • What devil, woman! pluck up your heart, and leave off all this glooming.c. 1553, anonymous author, Gammer Gurton's Needle, London: Gibbings & Co. for the Early English Drama Society, published 1906, act 3, scene 3, page 35
    Synonyms:
    misery, sadness, sorrow, woe

Meaning of gloom

Verb

gloom (third-person singular simple present glooms, present participle glooming, simple past and past participle gloomed)

  1. (intransitive) To be dark or gloomy.
    • Here, while the proud their long drawn pomps diſplay, / There the black gibbet glooms beſide the way.1770, [Oliver] Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, a Poem, London: […] W[illiam] Griffin, […], →OCLC, page 17
  2. (intransitive) To look or feel sad, sullen or despondent.
    • Her face gathers, furrows, glooms; arching eyebrows wrinkle into horizontals, and a tinge of bitterness unsmooths the cheek and robs the lip of sweetened grace. She is evidently perturbed.1882, W. Marshall, Strange Chapman: A North of England Story, volume 2, London: Hurst and Blackett, →OCLC, page 170
  3. (transitive) To render gloomy or dark; to obscure; to darken.
    • A black yew gloom'd the stagnant air.1855, Alfred Tennyson, “The Letters”, in Maud, and Other Poems, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 115
  4. (transitive) To fill with gloom; to make sad, dismal, or sullen.
    • For see you not, dear love, / Such a mood as that, which lately gloom'd / Your fancy when you saw me following you, / Must make me fear still more you are not mine, […]1859, Alfred Tennyson, “Vivien”, in Idylls of the King, London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC, page 110
  5. To shine or appear obscurely or imperfectly; to glimmer.

See all 9 meanings of gloom

Synonyms of glooming

Forms of glooming

pluralgloomings

Origin of glooming

Compare gloaming.

Words formed from glooming

Questions about glooming

What does glooming mean?
Glooming means twilight of morning or evening; the gloaming.
What is glooming the present participle and gerund of?
Glooming is the present participle and gerund of gloom.
What part of speech is glooming?
Glooming is a noun.
What is the plural of glooming?
The plural of glooming is gloomings.

Words near glooming in the dictionary

  1. gloomies
  2. gloomiest
  3. gloomily
  4. gloominess
  5. gloominesses
  6. glooming
  7. gloomingly
  8. gloomings
  9. gloomish
  10. gloomleader
  11. gloomleaders

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: glooming (page history and authors); gloom (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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