Word.ws English Dictionary

wilding

wilding noun: a wild apple or apple tree. Also the present participle and gerund of wild.

Noun (1)

wilding (plural wildings)

  1. A wild apple or apple tree.
    • These were ‘wildings’, wild crab apples (Malus sylvestris), a miniature of today's, native to the British Isles.2023, Ray Mears, chapter 1, in British Woodland, Ebury Spotlight, →ISBN
  2. Any plant that grows wild; a wildflower, etc.
    • Oft from the forrest wildings he did bring, / Whose sides empurpled were with smiling red […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • Ten ruddy wildings in the wood I found.1697, Virgil, “Pastoral 1”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC

Noun (2)

wilding (countable and uncountable, plural wildings)

  1. (US) A form of youth violence characterized by a group of young people committing violent acts randomly and without specific targets.

Adjective

wilding (not comparable)

  1. (poetic) Not cultivated or tame; wild.
    • The wilding bee hums merrily by.a. 1844, William Cullen Bryant, The Gladness of Nature
    • And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, / Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, / And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers: […]1859, Alfred Tennyson, “Enid”, in Idylls of the King, London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC, page 17

Proper noun capitalized: Wilding

Wilding

  1. A surname.

Noun (3) capitalized: Wilding

Wilding (plural Wildings)

  1. Any of a series of British stamps that have an image of Queen Elizabeth II based on a portrait by Dorothy Wilding.

Also used as

wilding is also the present participle and gerund of wild.

Forms of wilding

pluralwildings
pluralWildings

Plural of wilding: wildings

Origin of wilding

From Middle English wilding, wylding, wyldyng (“grass, straw, or the stems of wild plants”), equivalent to wild + -ing.

From wild + -ing.

Phrases with wilding

Questions about wilding

What does wilding mean?
Wilding means a wild apple or apple tree.
What part of speech is wilding?
Wilding can be a noun, an adjective or a proper noun.
What is the plural of wilding?
The plural of wilding is wildings.

Words near wilding in the dictionary

  1. Wildian
  2. wildie
  3. wildies
  4. wildin'
  5. wildin' out
  6. wilding
  7. wilding out
  8. wildings
  9. wildish
  10. wildishly
  11. wildishness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wilding (page history and authors); Wilding (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: “wilding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wilding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.