hounding

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of hound.

   Debt collectors kept hounding him with calls at all hours of the night.

   After the scandal broke, critics were hounding the senator to resign.

   Note

   The harassing meaning keeps the hunting picture: a hound is a dog bred to follow a scent, and hounding someone is chasing them like a pack that will not give up. After be it describes pressure that keeps going (reporters were hounding her), and a to-infinitive often names what the pursuers want, as in hounding the senator to resign.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Pursuit of someone or something, especially when it is persistent or relentless.

   The press's relentless hounding of the young prince drew sharp criticism.

   Weeks of hounding from creditors finally drove the little shop out of business.

   Similarharassment, persecution, badgering, pestering

   Note

   Usually built with of and the person pursued, and seldom neutral: to call a campaign a hounding is to take the side of its target. The Economist in 2011 judged the hounding of Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate who founded the Grameen Bank, to be vindictive. Press, creditors and critics are the usual pursuers.

3. 3
   noundateduncountable

   On a sailing vessel, the part of a mast between the deck and the hounds.

   The shipwright checked every foot of the hounding for rot before the voyage.

   Lightning split the mainmast's hounding a few feet above the deck.

   Note

   The name makes sense once you know the hounds: they are the shoulders near the head of a mast where the rigging rests, so the hounding covers most of the mast's length, from the deck up to where the shrouds are made fast. Like much of the vocabulary of wooden sailing ships, it is now met mainly in older seamanship writing, and it has no link in meaning to the chase.

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