nutting
- 1Present participle of nut.
They were nutting near the riverbank when the rain started.
Nutting on autumn afternoons was a favorite pastime in the village.
Note
The -ing form carries every verb sense of nut, and they sit far apart: the harmless "gather nuts", the UK slang "headbutt", a mildly vulgar sexual sense, and slang for hitting someone in the testicles or defeating them thoroughly. Context has to do the work. Went nutting in the woods is safe; elsewhere the slang readings are available. With a plural, nuttings, the gerund becomes the outing itself.
- 2A trip or outing made to gather nuts from the woods.
The villagers planned a day of nutting for the first cool morning of fall.
The younger people had their berrying frolics, sleigh-rides, kitchen dances, nuttings, and the like, and their elders their huskings, apple bees, and sewing societies, but against all these the deacon set his hard face.
1880, Henry Mills Alden, “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience”Note
A word from the calendar of country amusements. Henry Mills Alden, writing in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1880, sets nuttings beside berrying frolics, sleigh-rides, kitchen dances, huskings and apple bees. The countable use, a nutting or several nuttings, is rare. The noun also works uncountably for the activity, as in a day of nutting, which reads more naturally to most readers today.
- 3The act of thinking very hard or puzzling over something difficult.
It took a long stretch of nutting before the engineer saw the flaw in the design.
All that nutting over the riddle gave her a headache.
Note
Australian and New Zealand slang for mental grinding. It takes over for the problem and is easily intensified with hard. Dal Stivens's Jimmy Brockett (1951) has its narrator doing "a bit of hard nutting over my plans for trotting." Outside those countries it may simply be misread as the nut-gathering outing, so keep it to relaxed, informal speech.
I did some hard nutting over the problem before I rang him back.
A bit of nutting over the timetable sorted out the clash.
Less common meaning
- 4The act of gaining favor with someone, or submitting oneself to another.
Years of nutting to the nobles earned the clerk a comfortable position.
She refused the endless nutting that climbing the ranks seemed to demand.
Similartoadying, fawning, groveling
Note
A rare sense from the vocabulary of fawning and ingratiation. It appears in George Parker's Life's Painter of Variegated Characters (1789), a book full of swindlers' slang such as "drop genius" and "to turn you up". It belongs to that older cant, not to present-day English. In modern writing, a plainer phrase like currying favor carries the meaning without puzzling the reader.
Showing meanings only.
nutting is a form of nut
nut, verb: To reach orgasm, especially to ejaculate. Full entry
- Spelling
- nut → nutting: double the t, add -ing
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