Wiktionary

railing

English

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Etymology

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By surface analysis, rail ‎ -ing.

Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /ˈɹeɪlɪŋ/
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Rhymes: -eɪlɪŋ

Adjective

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railing (comparative more railing, superlative most railing)

  1. That rails; engaged in or given to violent complaining.
    • 1647, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher·, The CoxComb:
      Why does that railing man go with us?
    • 1918, Saint Thomas (Aquinas), The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, page 288:
      The daring of the railing reviler should be checked with moderation, i.e. as a duty of charity, and not through lust for one's own honour.
    • 2013, Paige Coleman, Delivering Women from the Snares of Death, page 52:
      A clamorous, debating, railing woman feels the need to have the last word.
    • 2016, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617:
      On Anger's self-awareness of the originality of writing as a railing woman, see McManus, "Eve's Dowry," p. 198.
  2. Filled with invective and violent complaints
    • 1844, William Wall, The history of infant-baptism, page 267:
      Petrus de Pilichdorf (in the year 1395, as he himself gives the date, cap 30,) writes a book of confutation of the several pretended errors of the Waldenses of this time in thirty-six chapters, but has nothing of baptism; though he descends to speak of many lesser matters, and aggravates all with very railing words, yet he finds nothing to accuse them of, but such things as the protestants now hold, except one or two, as the 'unlawfulness of 'all oaths,' &c.
    • 2010, David Cressy, Dangerous Talk, page 27:
      Such was the case of the 'very railing speeches against the justices' by Thomas Holman, vintner, of Terling, Essex, when he was presented in 1608 'for a common drunkard and for keeping ill rule in his house'.
    • 2016, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617, page 104:
      I return to earlier considerations of railing by looking at the ways in which the railing style of the Poets' War yields a significant, perverse, even queer fin de siècle aesthetics that is expressed in part by extreme articulations of masculinity: metaphors and puns represent men as either hyperagressive or effeminate.
  3. Blowing violently.
    • 1820, Anacreon, Odes of Anacreon - Volume 2, page 45:
      But scatter to the railing wind Each gloomy phantom of the mind!
    • 1906, Alfred Austin, The Garden that I Love, page 113:
      Had I a garden, claustral yews Should shut out railing wind,
    • 2015, Rosanne Croft, ‎Linda Reinhardt, ‎Sharon Bernash Smith, Once Upon a Christmas:
      Beginning way back in October, one railing storm after another had swept down off the Bitterroot Mountains and into the valley where the Rocking R had stood for three generations.

Derived terms

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Noun

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English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

railing (plural railings)

  1. A fence or barrier consisting of one or more horizontal rails and vertical supports.
    During the war, everyone's railings were taken away to make bombers.
    • 1989, The Advocate, numbers 515-521, page 28:
      We passed through an inner courtyard overladen with fake wrought-iron railings and accents badly in need of a paint job, evoking a kind of Woolworth's Vieux Carré.

Usage notes

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British use is normally the plural.

Derived terms

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Translations

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Verb

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railing

  1. present participle and gerund of rail

Anagrams

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