surrounding

Syllables: sur·round·ing/səˈɹaʊndɪŋ/

surrounding is the present participle and gerund of surround.

Noun

surrounding (plural surroundings)

An outlying area; area in proximity to something.
An environment.
- It was inevitable that German music should leave its impress upon the song of the Jew, that the Jew's spirit should be imbued with the musical scale and style of his surrounding.1929, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development, page 133
- They require a surrounding which keeps them from sinking into apathy through tasks which they are able to solve and duties they can carry out.1994, Kraft Eberhard Von Maltzahn, Nature as Landscape: Dwelling and Understanding, page 50

surround (third-person singular simple present surrounds, present participle surrounding, simple past and past participle surrounded)

(transitive) To encircle something or simultaneously extend in all directions.
- The hovel stood in the centre of what had once been a vegetable garden, but was now a patch of rank weeds. Surrounding this, almost like a zareba, was an irregular ring of gorse and brambles, an unclaimed vestige of the original common.1944, Miles Burton, chapter 5, in The Three Corpse Trick
Synonyms:

bound
(transitive) To enclose or confine something on all sides so as to prevent escape.
- The lions surrounded the deer herd so they had no way to escape.
(obsolete, transitive) To pass around; to travel about; to circumnavigate.
- to surround the world

plural	surroundings

What does surrounding mean?: Surrounding means an outlying area; area in proximity to something.
What is surrounding the present participle and gerund of?: Surrounding is the present participle and gerund of surround.
What part of speech is surrounding?: Surrounding is a noun.
How do you pronounce surrounding?: Surrounding is pronounced /səˈɹaʊndɪŋ/.
What is the plural of surrounding?: The plural of surrounding is surroundings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: surrounding (page history and authors); surround (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-surrounding.ogg.

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