swealing

swealing is the present participle and gerund of sweal.

swealing is the alternative form of swaling.

Meaning of sweal

sweal (third-person singular simple present sweals, present participle swealing, simple past and past participle swealed)

(intransitive) To burn slowly.
(intransitive) To melt and run down, as the tallow of a candle; waste away without feeding the flame.
- [M]ind ye dinna let the candle sweal as ye gang alang the wainscot parlour, and haud a' the house scouring to get out the grease again.1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter V, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume II (Old Mortality), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]...
(transitive) To singe; scorch; dress (as a hog) with burning or singeing.
(dialectal, transitive) To consume with fire; burn.
(dialectal, transitive) To make disappear; cause to waste away; diminish; reduce.
- "He thinks it's only a tumour!" cried Annie to her mother. "And he can sweal it away."1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “Baxter Dawes”, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […], →OCLC, part II, page 377

swaling (plural swalings)

Melted wax that runs down the edge of a candle.
- Metal cups, or basins, were very generally employed in churches for catching the swalings of wax candles, wax being a commodity too valuable to be wasted.1929, Archaeologia Cantiana, volume 41, page 68

plural	swealings

What is swealing the present participle and gerund of?: Swealing is the present participle and gerund of sweal.

Adapted from Wiktionary: swealing (page history and authors); sweal (page history and authors); swaling (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

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