beetling

Pluralbeetlings

1. 1
   adjective

   Sticking out prominently, most often said of a person's eyebrows.

   Her beetling eyebrows nearly met above her nose.

   The climbers paused beneath a beetling overhang of dark rock.

   Similarprominent

   Note

   Rock and brows are what beetle. In Rider Haggard's She (1886–87) and Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), it is a cliff's face or head hanging over the people below. Stewart Alsop, in 1960, gives Nixon "beetling brows" in a caricature of the fighting Irishman. The adjective is not graded: a brow is beetling or it is not, and "more beetling" sounds wrong.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of beetle.

   The crag stood beetling over the quiet valley floor.

   She spent the morning beetling between meetings across campus.

   Note

   One -ing form carries several quite different verbs. It can mean scurrying, often with away, or looming and jutting over something, or beating with a heavy mallet, including the hammering that finishes cloth. The looming verb lies behind the adjective for overhanging brows, and the mallet verb behind the cloth-finishing process. Context nearly always settles which one is meant: a crag beetles over, a person beetles off.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A part that juts out or protrudes.

   A heavy beetling of stone overhung the dark cave mouth.

   The sculptor carved a slight beetling into the figure's brow.

   Similaroverhang, projection, protrusion, ledge

   Note

   The noun turns an overhang into a thing in its own right. Melville uses it in Pierre (1852) in the plural, writing of "the beetlings and the menacings of the Terror Stone," so that projecting rock reads almost as a threat. It takes the regular plural beetlings. Where most writers would describe a beetling cliff with the adjective, the noun lets the jut itself stand as the subject.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The process in which fabrics and similar materials are finished by being beaten with a mallet.

   Like ironing cloth, but done by pounding it instead of pressing it.

   The mill was famous for the beetling that gave its linen a glossy finish.

   After weaving, the cloth went through beetling to flatten its surface.

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