crowding

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of pressing many people or things tightly around or against someone, filling the space available.

   The crowding at the stadium gates left several supporters bruised and shaken.

   Police warned that the crowding around the narrow entrance could quickly turn dangerous.

   Similarcongestion, crush, jostling, press

   Note

   Here the -ing form has become a full noun: it takes articles and adjectives and can go plural. Thomas Carlyle, writing on Boswell's Life of Johnson in 1832, pictures Hume seeing life as a fairground booth full of "foolish crowdings and elbowings". The plural turns a single act into the endless jostle of a throng. The test against the verbal form is simple: the crowding at the gates is this noun, while crowding the gates is the verb.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of crowd.

   Shoppers were crowding the aisles during the holiday sale.

   Crowding onto the last train, the commuters barely found room to stand.

   Note

   A participle that carries every use of the verb, transitive and intransitive. With an object it means filling or cramming (crowding the aisles). Without one it means pressing forward or massing together (crowding onto a train). Sailors keep a narrower use: a ship crowding another closes on it too nearly when the other has right of way. As a gerund it shades into the noun for the act itself, which alone can take a plural.

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