turtling

Pluralturtlings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A defensive game strategy that avoids conflict by keeping a strong defense and little or no offense while staying in a fixed position.

   Like a boxer who only blocks and never throws a punch, hoping the other tires out.

   The chess club frowns on turtling, since hunkering down behind pawns makes for dull matches.

   In strategy games, turtling lets a weaker player survive until reinforcements arrive.

   Note

   A player's word that crosses card games, board games and video games alike. The player digs in, fortifies, and waits instead of attacking. As a noun it names the whole strategy, so it pairs naturally with words like strategy, style or habit. The player doing it is described with the verb form: a player is turtling, or turtles in the early rounds.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of turtle.

   Their fleet is turtling, refusing to leave the safety of the harbor.

   Spectators booed as both players spent the round turtling.

   Note

   The participle of a verb that never takes an object. Every sense of turtle as a verb is intransitive, so a boat is turtling, a slow car goes turtling along, a cautious player is turtling, but nobody turtles a boat. The same spelling also serves as a noun, as in the capsizing sense, so check the frame: after is or was, it is the verb.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The hunting or catching of turtles, the reptiles, typically for their meat or shells.

   Coastal communities relied on turtling for both meat and shells.

   Strict laws have made turtling illegal in many countries.

   Note

   The word is built the plain way, turtle plus -ing, and it names an activity rather than a single catch, so it takes no plural. That matters because turtlings belongs to a different formation: the baby turtle, made with the diminutive -ling, as in duckling. When you meet turtlings, read it as young turtles, never as several hunts.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The capsizing of a vessel so that it turns completely upside down, hull pointing skyward.

   Like a turtle stuck on its back, the boat floats helplessly upside down.

   The crew trained for turtling, practicing how to escape an upside-down hull.

   Rough seas led to the turtling of the racing yacht.

   Similarcapsizing, overturning

   Note

   A sailor's noun for the idiom turning turtle, as in the turtling of a dinghy or a racing yacht. The verb behind it means to flip onto the back, so a hull is turtling while it goes over and has turtled once it lies keel up. The word is stronger than capsize: it insists on the full inversion, not a boat knocked onto its side.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   The newly hatched or very young form of a turtle.

   The turtling broke free of its shell and scrambled toward the surf.

   Predators pick off many turtlings before they ever reach the water.

   Similarturtlet

   Note

   This is the one turtling that can be counted. It pluralizes as turtlings, as when William Vaughn Moody wrote in 1912 of "the brood of turtlings" clambering out onto a log. The spelling is not fixed: a hyphenated turtle-ling appears in Sportdiving in 1997. Turtlet means the same thing and is built the same way, with a different little-suffix.

6. 6
   nounfigurativelyuncountable

   Any slow progression or gradual build-up.

   The town's turtling toward a new library took ten years of bake sales and small grants.

   The turtling of public support eventually tipped the vote.

   Similarcrawl, creep

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