Word.ws English Dictionary

rifling

/ˈɹaɪflɪŋ/

rifling noun: the act or process of making the grooves in a rifled cannon or gun barrel. Also the present participle and gerund of rifle.

Noun

rifling (plural riflings)

  1. The act or process of making the grooves in a rifled cannon or gun barrel.
  2. The system of grooves in a rifled gun barrel or cannon. Shunt rifling, rifling for cannon, in which one side of the groove is made deeper than the other, to facilitate loading with shot having projections which enter by the deeper part of the grooves.
  3. The act or process of letting playing cards cascade down one at a time towards the table (or one's hand), controlling the speed and flow with one's thumb, which sits on the top edges of the cards.

Also used as

rifling is also the present participle and gerund of rifle.

Forms of rifling

pluralriflings

Questions about rifling

What does rifling mean?
Rifling means the act or process of making the grooves in a rifled cannon or gun barrel.
What part of speech is rifling?
Rifling is a noun.
How do you pronounce rifling?
Rifling is pronounced /ˈɹaɪflɪŋ/.
What is the plural of rifling?
The plural of rifling is riflings.

Words near rifling in the dictionary

  1. riflescopes
  2. rifleshot
  3. rifleshots
  4. riflewoman
  5. riflewomen
  6. rifling
  7. riflings
  8. riflip
  9. riflips
  10. rifs
  11. rift

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rifling (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-rifling.wav.

Cite this entry: “rifling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rifling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.