Word.ws English Dictionary

sweltering

sweltering adjective: hot and humid; oppressively sticky. Also the present participle and gerund of swelter.

Adjective

sweltering

  1. hot and humid; oppressively sticky
    • The day was sweltering, so Lauren put on the shortest pair of shorts she could find and went to get ice-cream with her friend Rob.

Noun

sweltering (plural swelterings)

  1. The situation of being or feeling hot and humid.
    • March 11 1932, Northrop Frye, notebook
      It is truly a long way from Augustine's ultra-violet perspicacity to our swelterings in the intolerably sapping infra-red, but we are constantly plunging into deeper and deeper black and may rest our eyes in peace sometime.

Also used as

sweltering is also the present participle and gerund of swelter.

Forms of sweltering

pluralswelterings

Origin of sweltering

From swelter + -ing.

Words formed from sweltering

Questions about sweltering

What does sweltering mean?
Sweltering means hot and humid; oppressively sticky.
What part of speech is sweltering?
Sweltering can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near sweltering in the dictionary

  1. swelp
  2. swelt
  3. swelted
  4. swelter
  5. sweltered
  6. sweltering
  7. swelteringly
  8. swelterings
  9. swelters
  10. sweltersome
  11. sweltery

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweltering (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:

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