Word.ws English Dictionary

sembling

sembling noun: the practice of attracting male butterflies or other insects by exposing the encaged female. It used to be done by collectors wanting to procure specimens. Also the present participle and gerund of semble.

Noun

sembling (uncountable)

  1. (archaic) The practice of attracting male butterflies or other insects by exposing the encaged female. It used to be done by collectors wanting to procure specimens.
    • time of sembling birds' droppings1899, James William Tutt, A Natural History of the British Lepidoptera
    • Upon this is founded the practice of sembling, as it is called by the London collectors, among whom, as we learn from Barbut and Harris, it has been long in use, for entrapping the males of the fox-moth […]1831, James Rennie, Insect Architecture

Also used as

sembling is also the present participle and gerund of semble.

Origin of sembling

Compare assembling.

Questions about sembling

What does sembling mean?
Sembling means the practice of attracting male butterflies or other insects by exposing the encaged female. It used to be done by collectors wanting to procure specimens.
What part of speech is sembling?
Sembling is a noun.

Words near sembling in the dictionary

  1. semblaunt
  2. semblaunts
  3. semble
  4. sembled
  5. sembles
  6. sembling
  7. semduramicin
  8. seme
  9. semecarpol
  10. semed
  11. Semedo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sembling (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: “sembling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sembling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.