Word.ws English Dictionary

straining

straining is the present participle and gerund of strain.

Noun

straining (plural strainings)

  1. The act by which one strains. (muscles, etc)
    • sundry violent gaspings and strainings1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 4, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
  2. filtering, the process of passing something through a strainer.
    • Then after that process which Culverwel describes as so many strainings, refinings, and clarifyings, the mind is prepared for a true insight into the real nature of the world by way of intuition.1931, John de Boer, The Theory of Knowledge of the Cambridge Platonists, page 64

Meaning of strain

Verb

strain (third-person singular simple present strains, present participle straining, simple past and past participle strained)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To hold tightly, to clasp.
    • So hauing said, her twixt her armes twaine / She straightly straynd, and colled tenderly […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. (transitive) To apply a force or forces to by stretching out.
    • to strain a rope; to strain the shrouds of a ship
  3. (transitive) To damage by drawing, stretching, or the exertion of force.
    • The gale strained the timbers of the ship.
  4. (transitive) To act upon, in any way, so as to cause change of form or volume, as when bending a beam.
  5. (ambitransitive) To exert or struggle (to do something), especially to stretch (one's senses, faculties etc.) beyond what is normal or comfortable.
    • Sitting in back, I strained to hear the speaker.
  6. (transitive) To stretch beyond its proper limit; to do violence to, in terms of intent or meaning.
    • to strain the law in order to convict an accused person

See all 27 meanings of strain

Forms of straining

pluralstrainings

Phrases with straining

Questions about straining

What does straining mean?
Straining means the act by which one strains. (muscles, etc).
What is straining the present participle and gerund of?
Straining is the present participle and gerund of strain.
What part of speech is straining?
Straining is a noun.
What is the plural of straining?
The plural of straining is strainings.

Words near straining in the dictionary

  1. strainerless
  2. strainers
  3. strainest
  4. straineth
  5. strainful
  6. straining
  7. straining a point
  8. straining at a gnat
  9. straining at the leash
  10. straining beam
  11. straining beams

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: straining (page history and authors); strain (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: en-us-straining.ogg.

Cite this entry: “straining.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/straining. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.