Word.ws English Dictionary

stilling

stilling is the present participle and gerund of still.

Meaning of still

Verb (1)

still (third-person singular simple present stills, present participle stilling, simple past and past participle stilled)

  1. To calm down, to quiet.
    • to still the raging sea
    Synonyms:
    becalm, lull, quell

Verb (2)

still (third-person singular simple present stills, present participle stilling, simple past and past participle stilled)

  1. (obsolete) To trickle, drip.
    • And if that any drop of slombring rest / Did chaunce to still into her wearie spright,1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book III, canto ii, paragraph xxix
  2. To cause to fall by drops.
  3. To expel spirit from by heat, or to evaporate and condense in a refrigeratory; to distill.
    • The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat,
      The waters be wholesome, the charges not great1557 February 13 (Gregorian calendar), Thomas Tusser, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, London: […] Richard Tottel, →OCLC; republished London: […] Robert Triphook, […], and William Sancho, […]...

See all 26 meanings of still

Noun (1)

stilling (plural stillings)

  1. The act by which something is made still.
    • Rivette's interdiction on the tracking shot in Kapò contrasted with the double structure of arrests/stillings of image and spectator in Night and Fog served as an ethico-political talisman for all Daney's mature film criticism.2011, Griselda Pollock, Maxim Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema

Noun (2)

stilling (plural stillings)

  1. (UK, dialectal, obsolete) A stillion.

Forms of stilling

pluralstillings

Origin of stilling

Compare Low German Stelling, German stellen (“to set, to place”).

Questions about stilling

What does stilling mean?
Stilling means the act by which something is made still.
What is stilling the present participle and gerund of?
Stilling is the present participle and gerund of still.
What part of speech is stilling?
Stilling is a noun.
What is the plural of stilling?
The plural of stilling is stillings.

Words near stilling in the dictionary

  1. stillicidious
  2. stillicidium
  3. stillier
  4. stilliest
  5. stilliform
  6. stilling
  7. stillingia
  8. stillingias
  9. stillings
  10. Stillington
  11. Stillington and Whitton

Source and license

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