whittling
whittling is the present participle and gerund of whittle.
Noun
whittling (plural whittlings)
- A chip or shaving whittled from some larger substance.
- The art of carving shapes out of raw wood using a knife.
- A process of repeatedly shaving slivers from a piece of wood (non-artistic).
- The reducing of something by degrees, especially at the expense of some effort.
- a whittling down
- Result: nothing would prevent the rapid destruction of the Deco District. Already the developers are calling for a whittling down of the original square mile to a few blocks. The few blocks will no doubt be whittled down to one building, and in the end all that will be left will be a Deco mailbox...1988, Alexander Cockburn, Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era (Haymarket Series), Verso, →ISBN
Meaning of whittle
Verb
whittle (third-person singular simple present whittles, present participle whittling, simple past and past participle whittled)
- To cut or shape wood with a knife.
- He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter X, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
- To reduce or gradually eliminate something (such as a debt).
- To make eager or excited; to excite with liquor; to inebriate.
- When men are well whitled, their toungs run at randome1554, John Withals, A Dictionarie in English and Latine
Forms of whittling
| plural | whittlings |
|---|
Phrases with whittling
Questions about whittling
- What does whittling mean?
- Whittling means a chip or shaving whittled from some larger substance.
- What is whittling the present participle and gerund of?
- Whittling is the present participle and gerund of whittle.
- What part of speech is whittling?
- Whittling is a noun.
- What is the plural of whittling?
- The plural of whittling is whittlings.
Words near whittling in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whittling (page history and authors); whittle (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: “whittling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whittling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.