nooking

Pluralnookings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of nook.

   Note

   The -ing form works as a participle after be or spend (she spent the afternoon nooking in the window seat) and as a gerund that can take an object (nooking a desk under the stairs). Without an object it means tucking oneself away; with one, fitting a thing into a recess. The obsolete noun for a corner shares the spelling but, unlike the verb form, has a plural, nookings.

2. 2
   nounobsolete

   A corner or small recess, such as a niche in a wall; a nook.

   Walden Common is, we think, well situated, because it is not a nooking in some particular road, but it is the way,—the royal highway,—to various places.

   1845, John Player, Sketches of Saffron Walden

   My great want was books; I was too poor to purchase expensive ones, and the 'cheap literature' was not then, as now, to be found in every out-o'-the-way nooking.

   1864, Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century

   Note

   Nineteenth-century writers used this noun less for a literal corner than for an out-of-the-way place: a remote village, a spot off the main road. It keeps company with words of remoteness, as in obscure nookings or every out-of-the-way nooking. The word has since dropped out of use, and nook or corner does its work; the same spelling also serves as the verb's -ing form.

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