talking

Pluraltalkings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of talk.

   They spent the whole afternoon talking about their school days.

   Talking quietly, the two friends walked along the riverbank.

   Note

   The -ing form doing verb work. With be it builds progressive tenses, and as a gerund it keeps a verb's habits by taking adverbs and objects: talking quietly, talking French, talking business. That is how to tell it from the noun for the activity, which takes adjectives instead (idle talking) and can be plural. Every sense of talk passes through this form, including the informal emphatic one: we're talking serious money.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act or activity of speaking; conversation regarded as something one does.

   The meeting dissolved into idle talking with no decisions reached.

   Enough talking. It is time to actually do something.

   Similartalk, chatter, conversation, speaking

   Oppositesilence

   Note

   As a mass noun it names speaking as an activity, set beside listening or watching, as in W. B. Maxwell's The Mirror and the Lamp (1918). It can also go plural: Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) has "the loose little talkings" of idle men, where each talking is a separate bout of conversation. The word goes back to Middle English talkynge, simply talk plus -ing.

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