nodding

Pluralnoddings

1. 1
   moving the headverb

   Present participle and gerund of nod.

   The committee members sat nodding as the chairman outlined the budget.

   Nodding in quiet agreement, she signed the document without a word.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every use of nod, and its grammar shifts with the meaning. Nodding a greeting or nodding approval takes an object, because a nod can signify something. Nodding in the sense of drifting into sleep, or of slipping up through tiredness, takes none. Spelling doubles the d before -ing, and the plural noddings belongs only to the noun for the gesture.

2. 2
   a head movementnouncountable or uncountable

   The action of moving the head up and down, typically to show agreement or acknowledgment.

   A brief nodding of the head was all the approval the plan required.

   Her enthusiastic nodding signaled that the meeting could finally begin.

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this is a true countable noun, so it can be pluralized and counted. Robert Mudie's Babylon the Great (1828) mocks the Commons for arriving "with as many and as sapient noddings of the head, as a wooden mandarin performs in a tea-dealer's window." The plural turns a single gesture into a repeated, faintly comic performance, and of the head pairs naturally with it.

3. 3
   hanging floweradjective

   Of a plant or flower: bent over so that the flower faces downward.

   Like a bell hung mouth-down so rain runs off instead of collecting inside.

   Botanists recorded the nodding blooms drooping toward the soil.

   The plant's nodding flowers shield their pollen from the rain.

   Similarnutant

   Oppositeerect, upright

   Note

   Botany borrows the gesture as a fixed posture: nothing moves, and the bloom simply hangs. In formal plant descriptions the same habit is called nutant or cernuous. As a technical adjective it is not graded, so a flower is nodding or it is not, never "more nodding". It usually stands before the noun, as in nodding blooms, and describes shape rather than the verb's motion.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3