spooning

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of two people lying on their sides, nestled front-to-back, one person's front against the other's back.

   After their quarrel, spooning in bed felt like a quiet apology.

   She found real comfort in spooning with her partner through the long winter nights.

   Similarcuddling, snuggling

   Note

   The metaphor comes from a kitchen drawer: spoons stack compactly, each bowl curving into the next, and two bodies lying front-to-back follow each other's contours in the same way. The word is informal. Keep it apart from the older courting sense carried by the verb form, which meant flirting or making advances and implied nothing about lying down together.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of lifting or transferring something by means of a spoon.

   The chef demonstrated proper spooning of the sauce over the grilled fish.

   Gentle spooning of the jam onto warm toast released its scent across the kitchen.

   Similarscooping, ladling

   Note

   Unlike most action nouns, this one counts as well as massing. Ernest Hebert's Live Free Or Die (1995) has Frederick alternating sips of coffee with spoonings of raspberries, where each spooning is a single lift of the spoon. Spoonful names the amount the spoon holds, while spooning names the act of lifting it. The plural works best when the act is repeated in a rhythm.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of spoon.

   He stood at the counter spooning soup into containers for the week.

   The exhausted couple lay spooning beneath a thick wool blanket.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every use of the verb, and the verb does more than kitchen work. An angler spoons with a concave spoon bait. A player spoons a ball by lifting it weakly instead of striking it cleanly. An older courting sense, now dated, meant to flirt or make advances. So in a sentence like they were spooning, only context tells cuddling from courting.

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