wolfing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of wolf.

   She sat wolfing the sandwich as the train pulled into the station.

   Wolfing his breakfast in two minutes, he barely tasted a thing.

   Note

   One -ing form serves every sense of the verb, and the construction tells them apart. With an object it means eating greedily: wolfing a sandwich, wolfing his breakfast. Without an object it can be slang for chasing women, or it can mean hunting wolves, an activity that also has its own noun, the hunt for wolf skins. As a gerund it heads a noun phrase: wolfing his food was a lifelong habit.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The hunting of wolves to obtain their skins.

   Wolfing once offered a steady income to hunters along the frontier.

   The decline of wolfing followed the near-disappearance of wild wolf populations.

   Note

   A noun for a whole occupation rather than a single act, built like whaling or sealing from the animal plus -ing. It is uncountable, so it is never "a wolfing" or "wolfings". The trade, its hunters and its decline are what surround it. Those neighbors keep it apart from the far commoner gerund about gobbling food, which shares its spelling exactly.

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