looking

Plurallookings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of look.

   He stood at the gate, looking down the empty road.

   Looking through old letters made her smile all afternoon.

   Note

   Two endings meet in this one spelling. Old English lōciende was a participle in -ende, and it slid into the -ing already carried by nouns like the noun meaning a glance. As a participle it carries every use of look: looking at the sea, looking for the keys, looking tired. In the last, it works as a linking verb, so an adjective follows: she is looking tired, not tiredly.

2. 2
   verb

   Used as the final part of compound adjectives to mean having a particular appearance.

   The inspector found a healthy-looking crop in every field he visited.

   He drove up in an expensive-looking car none of us recognized.

   Note

   A combining use that turns almost any adjective into a verdict on appearance: healthy-looking, dorky-looking, expensive-looking. The compound judges the surface, not the substance, and it is hyphenated. Word order changes everything, as a 1988 personal ad in New York Magazine joked: a good-looking, funny guy is not a funny-looking, good guy. Good-looking has settled into meaning attractive, while funny-looking means odd.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The action of directing one's eyes toward something; a glance.

   A careful looking over the contract revealed a hidden clause near the end.

   Her constant looking at the clock showed just how bored she was.

   Similarglancing, glance, examination

   Note

   A noun with its own line of descent, separate from the verb form: Old English lōcung, found in the compound þurhlōcung, a "looking through." It behaves as a count noun and takes a plural. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins write of "a complicated interplay of lookings and viewings" (2005). That plural suits writing about images and viewing; in everyday speech, a look or a glance does the job.

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