Word.ws English Dictionary

rubbishing

rubbishing is the present participle and gerund of rubbish.

Meaning of rubbish

Verb

rubbish (third-person singular simple present rubbishes, present participle rubbishing, simple past and past participle rubbished)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, colloquial, transitive) To criticize, to denigrate, to denounce, to disparage.
    • In my judgment, it is not Christian—I think that is the proper way to put it—to rubbish the leaders of our trade union movements, both employers' and workers'. [...] The employers are quite right in rubbishing this section. The recently retired Chief Ombudsman rubbished it. The insurance guild, not...1977 August 17, A[rthur] J[ames] Faulkner, “Human Rights Commission Bill”, in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): Third Session, Thirty-eighth Parliament (House of Representatives), volume 412...
  2. (Australia, Commonwealth, Hong-Kong, Ireland, UK, colloquial) To litter.
    • Speaking at today's (Tuesday) press conference to announce details of the show, Chairman of the Steering Committee, Mr Cheng Chun-ping urged members of the public to sustain their keep clean efforts and to let the message of the campaign slogan -- "There is never any excuse to rubbish your home"...1999 December 1, Cheng Chun-ping, quotee, “Special TV programme to disseminate keep clean messages”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)

See all 9 meanings of rubbish

Adjective

rubbishing (comparative more rubbishing, superlative most rubbishing)

  1. (dated) trashy; paltry
    • The man was a fool to invest his money in such a rubbishing concern. They must have all been mad who did!1877, D. M. F. Walker, Loyal and True, page 178

Forms of rubbishing

comparativemore rubbishing
superlativemost rubbishing

Questions about rubbishing

What does rubbishing mean?
Rubbishing means trashy; paltry.
What is rubbishing the present participle and gerund of?
Rubbishing is the present participle and gerund of rubbish.
What part of speech is rubbishing?
Rubbishing is an adjective.

Words near rubbishing in the dictionary

  1. rubbishes
  2. rubbishest
  3. rubbishier
  4. rubbishiest
  5. rubbishiness
  6. rubbishing
  7. rubbishly
  8. rubbishness
  9. rubbishry
  10. rubbishy
  11. rubble

Source and license

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