Word.ws English Dictionary

slumbering

slumbering is the present participle and gerund of slumber.

Meaning of slumber

Verb

slumber (third-person singular simple present slumbers, present participle slumbering, simple past and past participle slumbered)

  1. (intransitive) To be in a very light state of sleep, almost awake.
    • He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Psalm 121:4
  2. (intransitive) To be inactive or negligent.
  3. (obsolete, transitive) To lay to sleep.
    • slumber his conscience1642, Henry Wotton, A Short View of the Life and Death of George Villers, Duke of Buckingham
  4. (obsolete, transitive) To stun; to stupefy.
    • Then vp he tooke the slombred sencelesse corse.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

See all 8 meanings of slumber

Adjective

slumbering

  1. Temporarily inactive.
    • The slumbering giant that was China has finally awoken.
    • Strangely light and delicate was his frame and seeming, yet with a sense of slumbering power beneath, as the delicate peak of a snow mountain seen afar in the low red rays of morning.1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 5

Noun

slumbering (plural slumberings)

  1. sleep
    • In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed[…]1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Job 33:15

Forms of slumbering

pluralslumberings

Words formed from slumbering

Questions about slumbering

What does slumbering mean?
Slumbering means temporarily inactive.
What is slumbering the present participle and gerund of?
Slumbering is the present participle and gerund of slumber.
What part of speech is slumbering?
Slumbering can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near slumbering in the dictionary

  1. slumberer
  2. slumberers
  3. slumberest
  4. slumbereth
  5. slumberful
  6. slumbering
  7. slumberingly
  8. slumberings
  9. slumberland
  10. slumberless
  11. slumberlessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: slumbering (page history and authors); slumber (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)-Flame, not lame-slumbering.wav.

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