wilding

Pluralwildings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A plant that grows wild on its own; a wildflower or similar uncultivated plant.

   Among the garden flowers, a single wilding had taken root by the fence.

   The hillside was covered with wildings that no one had sown.

   Similarwildflower

   Note

   Here the word widens from the apple to anything that springs up unsown, though its classic users still had fruit in mind. Spenser's forest wildings in The Faerie Queene (1590) are "empurpled" with red, and Dryden's Virgil (1697) finds "ten ruddy wildings in the wood." Landor, in Imaginary Conversations, judges a small, juiceless fruit "to be a wilding." In older verse it often blurs with the wild apple.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A wild apple, or the apple tree it grows on, springing up uncultivated.

   A gnarled wilding stood at the edge of the field, heavy with small fruit.

   They gathered wildings to press into a tart cider.

   Note

   The name goes back to Middle English wilding, a word for grass, straw and the stems of wild plants, built from wild plus -ing. Applied to apples, it means the small crab, Malus sylvestris, which Ray Mears in British Woodland (2023) calls native to the British Isles. A wilding can be the fruit or the whole tree. Context decides: you gather wildings, but a wilding stands at the field's edge.

3. 3
   verbslang

   Present participle and gerund of wild.

   He texted his boss at three in the morning asking for a raise. He's been wilding lately.

   Everyone at the reception was still talking about his wilding, from the karaoke solo to the cake incident.

   Note

   One spelling does double duty. After be it is a participle (he's been wilding), and after a possessive it is a noun (their wilding, in Stephen King's 11/22/63). Both slang uses of wild live here. The "acting strangely" meaning is mostly met in this form, often clipped to wildin' in casual writing. The other names gang assault and robbery in a city, so keep it out of jokes.

4. 4
   adjectiveliterary

   Not cultivated or tamed. Growing or living wild.

   The poet wrote of wilding meadows untouched by plow or fence.

   A wilding tangle of vines covered the forgotten garden.

   Similaruntamed, uncultivated, feral

   Oppositecultivated, tame

   Note

   A poet's adjective, kept for things nobody planted or tended. William Cullen Bryant has a "wilding bee," and Tennyson sets "wilding flowers" on a fallen tower in Idylls of the King (1859). It goes before its noun and takes no comparison, so nothing is more wilding than anything else. In ordinary prose, plain wild does the job. Wilding earns its place when a line wants an extra syllable and an older sound.

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