Word.ws English Dictionary

sounding out

sounding out is the present participle and gerund of sound out.

Meaning of sound out

Verb

sound out (third-person singular simple present sounds out, present participle sounding out, simple past and past participle sounded out)

  1. (transitive) To question and listen attentively in order to discover a person's opinion, intent, or preference, especially by using indirect conversational remarks.
    • You'll have to ask them—sound them out.1918, Peter B. Kyne, chapter 24, in The Valley of the Giants
    Synonyms:
    to feel out, to check out
  2. (transitive) To pronounce a word or phrase by articulating each of its letters or syllables slowly in sequence.
  3. (intransitive) To speak or sing loudly, to call out.
    • Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!c. 1855, Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, stanza 9

Questions about sounding out

What is sounding out the present participle and gerund of?
Sounding out is the present participle and gerund of sound out.

Words near sounding out in the dictionary

  1. sounding line
  2. sounding lines
  3. sounding machine
  4. sounding machines
  5. sounding off
  6. sounding out
  7. sounding rocket
  8. sounding rockets
  9. sounding rod
  10. sounding rods
  11. sounding stone

Source and license

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