bellying

Pluralbellyings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of belly.

   The tent kept bellying in and out as the storm swept across the campsite.

   Bellying under the barbed wire took the recruits most of the morning.

   Note

   One -ing spelling does two jobs: the participle after be (the tent kept bellying in and out) and the gerund that names the action (bellying under barbed wire is slow work). The y of belly stays put before -ing, unlike the i of bellied. Its meanings run from billowing cloth to crawling on the stomach, and the words around it, in and out or under, usually say which.

2. 2
   adjective

   Bulging or billowing outward, as a sail does when the wind fills it.

   A bellying canvas awning snapped and flapped over the café tables.

   The bellying folds of her cape trailed behind her down the stairs.

   Note

   Cloth that the air fills is its natural subject: the "bellying sail" in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, the "bellying crimson curtains" of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, the "bellying sweep" of a gown in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. Hugh Walpole turns it on a sleeping man, the "stout bellying occupant" of a chair, and there the word's root in belly shows through. It is not compared.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A shape that bulges, swells or billows outward, or the act or state of bulging, swelling or billowing.

   A sudden bellying of black smoke above the factory warned the town that something was wrong.

   Heavy bellyings of dark walnut made the antique dresser look swollen.

   Similarbulge, swelling, billow

   Note

   The noun takes a plural, bellyings, for the separate swells of a rolling mass. H. G. Wells, in The War of the Worlds (1898), pictures the "coils and bellyings" of black smoke advancing headlong, and Violet Hunt, in The Flurried Years (1926), recoils from a room's "hideous bellyings of brown mahogany," the swollen curves of heavy furniture. In the singular it can name the swelling as it happens.

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