surrounding

Pluralsurroundings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of surround.

   Police officers were surrounding the building by midnight.

   Surrounding the city, the hills block most of the winter wind.

   Note

   One spelling does several jobs here. It forms the progressive (police were surrounding the building), the gerund (surrounding a city takes many troops) and the participle before a noun, as in the surrounding hills. That last use is so common that the form is often treated as an adjective. As a verb it takes an object. The same spelling also works as a noun for the area around something.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An outlying area; the area lying close to or around something.

   The castle's surroundings, mostly farmland, have changed little in a century.

   Hikers explored the surroundings of the village before heading into the mountains.

   Similarenvirons, vicinity, neighborhood, outskirts

   Note

   Everyday English almost always uses the plural: the village and its surroundings, pleasant surroundings. The singular is now uncommon outside older or formal writing, so the plural is the safe choice. Keep it apart from the participle in the surrounding countryside. The noun names the area itself, while the participle describes what lies around something.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   An environment; the whole set of conditions and things that exist around someone or something.

   A calm surrounding helps patients recover faster after surgery.

   Soldiers are trained to stay aware of their surroundings at all times.

   Similarenvironment, setting, milieu

   Note

   The singular survives in this more abstract use, usually with an article. Kraft Eberhard Von Maltzahn's Nature as Landscape (1994) speaks of people who "require a surrounding which keeps them from sinking into apathy." Here the word means the conditions that shape a life, not the land nearby. It is closer to environment than to the area around a place, though the plural is still the more familiar form.

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