Word.ws English Dictionary

stranding

stranding is the present participle and gerund of strand.

Meaning of strand

Verb (1)

strand (third-person singular simple present strands, present participle stranding, simple past and past participle stranded)

  1. (transitive) To run aground; to beach.
    Synonyms:
    beach
  2. (figuratively, transitive) To leave (someone) in a difficult situation; to abandon or desert.
    1. (figuratively, transitive) To cause the third out of an inning to be made, leaving a runner on base.
      • Jones pops up; that's going to strand a pair.
  3. (transitive) To leave an element (e.g., an adposition) without its complement adjacent to it.
    • We first note that wh-movement can freely strand prepositions in Icelandic, as in the other Scandinavian languages.1985, Joan Maling, Annie Zaenen, “Preposition-Stranding and Passive”, in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, volume 8, number 2, →DOI, page 199

Verb (2)

strand (third-person singular simple present strands, present participle stranding, simple past and past participle stranded)

  1. (transitive) To break a strand of (a rope).
  2. (transitive) To form by uniting strands.

See all 24 meanings of strand

Noun

stranding (plural strandings)

  1. The act or occasion by which somebody or something is stranded.
    • The day of our arrival two belugas had accidentally become grounded in the shallows of a river delta near the station, and now that the tide had gone out, they seemed helplessly stuck. Such strandings are uncommon, and they offer scientists the opportunity to tag, measure, and determine the sex of...1989 May, Jeff MacInnis, “Braving the Northwest Passage”, in National Geographic, volume 175, number 5, pages 594-595
    • All of these factors increase the probability of stranding and the severity of the consequences. Since 2011, there have been several strandings that resulted in unplanned evacuations, because the passengers became desperate from personal discomfort or lack of confidence of being rescued.2023 May 3, David Bradley, “Driver Only Operation should depend on passenger density”, in RAIL, number 982, page 62
    1. Leaving (a word or phrase) without any expressed complement, or allowing (it) to go without one.

Forms of stranding

pluralstrandings

Questions about stranding

What does stranding mean?
Stranding means the act or occasion by which somebody or something is stranded.
What is stranding the present participle and gerund of?
Stranding is the present participle and gerund of strand.
What part of speech is stranding?
Stranding is a noun.
What is the plural of stranding?
The plural of stranding is strandings.

Words near stranding in the dictionary

  1. strandees
  2. strander
  3. stranders
  4. strandflat
  5. strandflats
  6. stranding
  7. strandings
  8. strandless
  9. strandlike
  10. strandline
  11. strandlines

Source and license

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