foundering

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of founder.

   The tanker was foundering off the coast after striking a submerged reef.

   Foundering in the gale, the trawler lost power and began to slip beneath the swell.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every meaning of the verb, not only the nautical one. A foundering ship fills and sinks, a foundering horse stumbles and goes lame, and a foundering plan is failing. Today ships founder on their own; the transitive use, with a ship as object, is archaic. It has no connection to founder in the sense of 'one who establishes something', which is a noun and has no -ing form.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The sinking of a vessel, especially as it fills with water and goes down.

   The foundering of the cargo ship was blamed on an overloaded hold and a cracked seam.

   Survivors described the slow foundering of the vessel over several terrifying hours.

   Similarsinking, wreck

   Note

   A countable noun as well as an abstract one: the plural founderings is natural. Mark L. Thompson uses it that way in Graveyard of the Lakes (2004), describing ships that are afloat one second and sinking the next. Unlike the verb's -ing form, it takes an article and an of-phrase, as in the foundering of the cargo ship.

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