Word.ws English Dictionary

tinkling

tinkling noun: a tinkle; a tinkling sound. Also the present participle and gerund of tinkle.

Noun

tinkling (plural tinklings)

  1. A tinkle; a tinkling sound.
    • The merry piano tinklings were gone.1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 591
  2. (Jamaica) The Greater Antillean Grackle, Quiscalus niger.
  3. The action of the verb to tinkle

Adjective

tinkling (not comparable)

  1. That tinkles.
    • A tinkling piano in the next apartment, / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant, / A fairground's painted swings... / These foolish things remind me of you.1936, Eric Maschwitz, “These Foolish Things”
    • American Christians, you may master the intricacies of the English language and you may possess the eloquence of articulate speech; but even though you speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, you are like sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., “Paul's Letter to American Christians”, in Strength to Love, New York: Pocket Books, published 1964, →OCLC, page 163
  2. (obsolete) That works as a tinker

Also used as

tinkling is also the present participle and gerund of tinkle.

Forms of tinkling

pluraltinklings

Words formed from tinkling

Questions about tinkling

What does tinkling mean?
Tinkling means a tinkle; a tinkling sound.
What part of speech is tinkling?
Tinkling can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of tinkling?
The plural of tinkling is tinklings.

Words near tinkling in the dictionary

  1. tinklers
  2. tinkles
  3. tinklesome
  4. tinklier
  5. tinkliest
  6. tinkling
  7. tinklingly
  8. tinklings
  9. tinkly
  10. Tinkoff
  11. Tinkov

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tinkling (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: “tinkling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tinkling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.