punding
punding noun: a human activity characterized by compulsive fascination with and performance of repetitive, mechanical tasks, such as assembling and disassembling, collecting, or sorting household objects. Also the archaic form of pudding.
Noun
punding (uncountable)
- A human activity characterized by compulsive fascination with and performance of repetitive, mechanical tasks, such as assembling and disassembling, collecting, or sorting household objects.
- Punding may consist of activities such as collecting pebbles and lining them up as perfectly as possible, or disassembling doorknobs and putting them back together again.
- What Pollan is describing here is a mild form of ‘punding’, a phenomenon first described by intravenous amphetamine addicts.2021 July, AJ Lees, “Never Mind the Neurobollocks”, in The Literary Review
Also used as
punding is also the archaic form of pudding.
Origin of punding
A gerundial noun from the slang term to pund used by addicts, coined by Swedish forensic psychiatrist G. Rylander, in 1968. Folke Sjöqvist, Malcolm Tottie, editor (1969), “Clinical and Medico-criminological aspects of addiction to Central Stimulating Drugs”, in Abuse of central stimulants: Symposium arranged by the Swedish Committee on International Health Relations, Stockholm, November 25-27, 1968, Almqvist & Wiksell, page 257
Questions about punding
- What does punding mean?
- Punding means a human activity characterized by compulsive fascination with and performance of repetitive, mechanical tasks, such as assembling and disassembling, collecting, or sorting household objects.
- What part of speech is punding?
- Punding is a noun.
Words near punding in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: punding (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: “punding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/punding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.