swimming

Pluralswimmings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The activity or skill of staying afloat and moving through water using the body.

   Swimming builds endurance without putting stress on the joints.

   He took up swimming after his doctor recommended low-impact exercise.

   Note

   The everyday name for the pastime goes back to Middle English swymmynge, formed from swim, 'to move through water', plus the -ing that turns verbs into nouns. Usually it names the activity in general, but it can also count single feats: Swami Rama Tirtha in 1909 praises Americans' swimmings across the Niagara rapids. Its spelling is shared with the giddy-headed sense, which is built on swim 'to be dizzy'.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of swim.

   Dolphins were swimming alongside the boat for nearly an hour.

   She kept swimming until she finally reached the far shore.

   Note

   As a participle it builds progressive tenses with be (were swimming). As a gerund it fills a noun's slot but still behaves like a verb, so it can take an object: swimming the Channel, swimming butterfly. That object is the clearest sign it is not the noun for the activity. The verb's figurative uses carry over too, as in eyes swimming with tears or a coat swimming on a thin frame.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A dizzy, reeling sensation in the head, as in vertigo.

   A faint swimming in the head warned her she might pass out.

   The heat brought on a swimming that forced him to steady himself against the wall.

   Similardizziness, giddiness, vertigo

   Note

   Here the word belongs to the older language of physic and herbals, where it sits beside giddiness and turnings as an ailment to be eased. It nearly always names its location, as in a swimming in the head or swimmings of the head, and it readily takes a plural. Chambers's Miscellany still writes of swimmings of the head in 1869, and John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (1640) offers speedwell as a remedy.

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