spoiling

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of spoil.

   The unrefrigerated cheese was spoiling rapidly in the summer heat.

   Constant interruptions were spoiling the careful mood she had built.

   Note

   One -ing form does two jobs here. It is a progressive verb (the rain is spoiling the picnic) and a gerund (spoiling a grandchild is half the fun). Today it carries the verb's ruining and pampering meanings, usually with an object: spoiling the view, spoiling a child. The verb's older senses of stripping and plundering are now archaic, and they live on more visibly in the plunder noun.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The seizing of property by force, as armies engage in plunder or pillage during war or conquest.

   The invaders' spoiling of the countryside left villages stripped bare.

   Reports of widespread spoiling followed the city's fall.

   Similarplunder, pillage, looting, plundering, ransacking

   Note

   This is the violent meaning, kin to the verb's archaic sense of stripping a city or a defeated enemy. It counts as well as names, so separate acts become spoilings. Benjamin Franklin's Proposed Preamble to a Congressional Resolution on Privateering (1775) lists "all the spoilings, thefts, burnings of houses and towns." In older texts like this one, read it as seizure by force, not as ruin or pampering.

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