railing

That rails; engaged in or given to violent complaining.

Adjective

  1. That rails; engaged in or given to violent complaining.
    • Why does that railing man go with us? - 1647, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher·, The CoxComb:
    • The daring of the railing reviler should be checked with moderation, i.e. as a duty of charity, and not through lust for one's own honour. - 1918, Saint Thomas (Aquinas), The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas,...
    • A clamorous, debating, railing woman feels the need to have the last word. - 2013, Paige Coleman, Delivering Women from the Snares of Death, page 52:
  2. Filled with invective and violent complaints
    • Petrus de Pilichdorf (in the year 1395, as he himself gives the date, cap 30,) writes a book of confutation of the several pretended errors of the Waldenses of this time in thirty-six chapters, but has nothing of...
    • Such was the case of the 'very railing speeches against the justices' by Thomas Holman, vintner, of Terling, Essex, when he was presented in 1608 'for a common drunkard and for keeping ill rule in his house'. - 2010,...
    • I return to earlier considerations of railing by looking at the ways in which the railing style of the Poets' War yields a significant, perverse, even queer fin de siècle aesthetics that is expressed in part by extreme...
  3. Blowing violently.
    • But scatter to the railing wind Each gloomy phantom of the mind! - 1820, Anacreon, Odes of Anacreon - Volume 2, page 45:
    • Had I a garden, claustral yews Should shut out railing wind, - 1906, Alfred Austin, The Garden that I Love, page 113:
    • Beginning way back in October, one railing storm after another had swept down off the Bitterroot Mountains and into the valley where the Rocking R had stood for three generations. - 2015, Rosanne Croft, Linda Reinhardt,...

Origin

By surface analysis, rail + -ing.

Forms

more railing most railing

Derived

railingly

Noun

  1. A fence or barrier consisting of one or more horizontal rails and vertical supports.
    • During the war, everyone's railings were taken away to make bombers.
    • We passed through an inner courtyard overladen with fake wrought-iron railings and accents badly in need of a paint job, evoking a kind of Woolworth's Vieux Carré. - 1989, The Advocate, numbers 515-521, page 28:

Forms

railings

Derived

bridge railing guard railing handrailing hand railing railinged railingless stair railings wall railing

Verb

  1. present participle and gerund of rail