troubling

Pluraltroublings

1. 1
   adjective

   Causing worry or distress.

   The committee found the latest financial figures troubling.

   Investigators uncovered a troubling pattern of negligence at the plant.

   Similarworrying, disturbing, alarming, concerning, unsettling

   Oppositereassuring, comforting, encouraging

   Note

   Here the -ing form has become a true adjective, and its grammar shows it: it takes more and most (more troubling, most troubling) and sits comfortably after find, seem and be. A troubling report describes the report's effect on whoever reads it. When an object follows instead, as in troubling investors, the word is back to being the verb in progress.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of trouble.

   The economic outlook is troubling investors across the region.

   A persistent cough kept troubling him through the night.

   Note

   Every sense of the verb trouble passes through this form, including the reflexive one: she kept troubling herself to call. The archaic physical sense survives here too, in troubling the waters, meaning stirring them up. As a gerund the form names the action itself (troubling him was pointless), standing where a noun would stand while still taking an object like a verb.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of causing someone trouble or distress.

   The deliberate troubling of witnesses delayed the trial for weeks.

   Her novel dwells on the troubling of ordinary lives by war.

   Similardisturbance, disruption, harassment

   Note

   A noun that can be counted, so it pluralizes. Troublings are separate acts or episodes of distress, not distress in general. The plural has a long life in English prose. Henry Foulis's The History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations (1681) pairs the Pope's censures and troublings of the Emperor. Philip Bennett Power's Litanies of daily life (1882) prays for deliverance "from all troublings of covetousness and ambition."

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