bouncing

Pluralbouncings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of bounce.

   Hailstones were bouncing off the car roof during the storm.

   She spent the morning bouncing on the old mattress with her cousins.

   Note

   Bounce works both with and without an object, and the -ing form keeps both uses. Without an object, the subject itself rebounds, as with hail bouncing off a roof. With one, someone makes something rebound, as in bouncing a ball. The colloquial use takes off or by: bouncing an idea off a colleague means trying it out to get a reaction.

2. 2
   adjective

   In good health and full of strength and energy.

   The midwife handed them a bouncing baby boy.

   Years of farm work left him a bouncing, hearty old man.

   Similarhealthy, robust, thriving, vigorous, bonny

   Oppositesickly, frail, puny

   Note

   Its most familiar setting is the birth announcement: a bouncing baby girl, a bouncing baby boy. The word reaches further than that, though. Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) sets "tall and bouncing young ladies" beside a childlike Rebecca Sharp, and there it means robust and well-grown rather than merely healthy. In both uses the energy is physical: the word describes a body, not a mood.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The action or movement of something that springs back after hitting a surface.

   The bouncing of the basketball echoed through the empty gym.

   A single hard bouncing sent the marble skittering under the couch.

   Similarrebound, rebounding

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this noun can be counted: one bouncing, many bouncings. The plural treats each rebound as a separate event. That is what lets Daniel Price's Without a Woman to Read (1997) call a book with "multiple trajectories" and violent juxtapositions "the record" of "those bouncings," turning the rebounds of an object into the swerves of an argument.

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