Word.ws English Dictionary

rattling around

rattling around is the present participle and gerund of rattle around.

Meaning of rattle around

Verb

rattle around (third-person singular simple present rattles around, present participle rattling around, simple past and past participle rattled around)

  1. (informal) To take up little space in a house or other building that one occupies; to live somewhere that is needlessly spacious.
    • His mother had died within a year after his return; his wife and newborn son, both from influenza, in 1916 when Francine was four. Now the two of them rattled around in the old house, even with his office and small clinic sharing the downstairs with the kitchen, parlor, and dining room.1978, Tom Reamy, Blind Voices
    Synonyms:
    rattle about

Questions about rattling around

What is rattling around the present participle and gerund of?
Rattling around is the present participle and gerund of rattle around.

Words near rattling around in the dictionary

  1. rattlines
  2. rattling
  3. rattling a saber
  4. rattling a sabre
  5. rattling about
  6. rattling around
  7. rattling off
  8. rattling one's hocks
  9. rattling one's saber
  10. rattling one's sabre
  11. rattling sabres

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rattling around (page history and authors); rattle around (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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Cite this entry: “rattling around.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rattling_around. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.