wounding

Pluralwoundings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of wound.

   He was wounding his own reputation with every careless remark.

   Wounding an animal needlessly is widely considered cruel.

   Note

   The -ing form belongs only to the verb of injury, whether the hurt is to skin or to feelings. The spelling sets a trap: wound is also the past tense of wind, but that verb's participle is winding, never wounding. A road can be winding and a remark can be wounding, and the two verbs are unrelated.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of inflicting an injury on a person or animal.

   The deliberate wounding of the hostages drew international condemnation.

   Prosecutors described the wounding as unprovoked and brutal.

   Similarmaiming

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A particular occurrence in which a person or animal is wounded.

   The medic treated each wounding as it arrived from the front.

   Several woundings from the explosion required immediate surgery.

   Similarinjury

   Note

   Here the person named is the one who suffers the wound, not the one who gives it. Mary Hunter Austin's The Arrow Maker (1911) asks who goes to war "that I should grieve for his wounding". There, his marks the injured man, as it would in his death. Add of and the roles flip: his wounding of the guard names the attacker, which is the act of inflicting.

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