bantering

Pluralbanterings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of banter.

   The players stood by the bench, bantering with fans before the warm-up began.

   My uncle loves bantering about my cooking, but he always asks for seconds.

   Note

   The -ing form does both jobs of the verb: after be it shows an exchange in progress (they were bantering with fans), and as a gerund it stands where a noun would (bantering helps them relax). It carries the dialect senses of banter too: in the Southern US, bantering someone can mean challenging them to a contest, and in British dialect it can mean haggling a price down.

2. 2
   adjective

   Teasing in tone or manner, poking fun at someone.

   He answered the reporter's question in a bantering tone that drew laughs from the room.

   The coach's bantering manner hid how seriously he took every practice.

   Similarteasing, playful, jocular

   Note

   As an adjective it is compared with more and most rather than -er and -est: a more bantering reply, the most bantering of his letters. It sits most comfortably before words for a way of speaking, such as tone, manner, voice or reply, and keeps the playful edge of banter, so a bantering remark teases without meaning to wound.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Teasing or joking remarks, or the activity of making them.

   Their easy bantering at the dinner table showed how long they had been friends.

   She soon tired of the reporters' banterings and asked them to get to the point.

   Similarteasing, joking, ribbing

   Note

   The noun can be counted: banterings are separate teasing remarks, as when Harry Stillwell Edwards, in Two Runaways and Other Stories, has a girl learn to give keen answers to the tourists' good-humored banterings. Left uncountable, it names the activity itself and overlaps with the plain noun banter, which most writers reach for first.

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