bellying

English

Etymology

By surface analysis, belly +‎ -ing.

Verb

bellying

1. present participle and gerund of belly

Adjective

bellying (not comparable)

1. Bulging or billowing.
   • 1908 October, Kenneth Grahame, chapter 9, in The Wind in the Willows, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC:

     Did it change into the cry of the wind, plaintive at first, angrily shrill as it freshened, rising to a tearing whistle, sinking to a musical trickle of air from the leech of the bellying sail?

   • 1922 October 26, Virginia Woolf, chapter 12, in Jacob’s Room, Richmond, London: […] Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, →OCLC:

     And the light mounts over the faces of all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the lustrous bellying crimson curtains […]

   • 1925, Hugh Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair‎^[1], Part I, Chapter 6:

     He looked at the stout bellying occupant of the other chair, his mouth open, his snores reverberant.

   • 1950, Mervyn Peake, chapter 17, in Gormenghast, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode:

     As he swept out of the room with a bellying sweep of his gown and a toss of his silver hair, his old heart was beating madly.

Noun

bellying (plural bellyings)

1. A bulging, swelling or billowing shape; the act or state of bulging, swelling or billowing.
   • 1693, Simon de la Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam, translated by A.P., London: Tho. Horne, Part II, Chapter II. Of the Houses of the Siamese, and of their Architecture in Publick Buildings, page 32,^[2]

     But the Principal Ornament of the Pagodes, is to be accompanied, as generally they are, with several Pyramids of Lime and Brick […] Some there are which diminish and grow thick again four or five times in their heighth, so that the Profile of them goes waving: But these Bellyings out are smaller as they are in a higher part of the Pyramid.

   • 1873, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Sunset,” Diary entry dated 3 November, 1873, in The Dublin Review, July, August, September, 1920, p. 64,^[3]

     A few minutes later the brightness over; one great dull rope coiling overhead sidelong from the sunset, its dewlaps and bellyings painted with a maddery campion-colour that seemed to stoop and drop like sopped cake;

   • 1898, H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds‎^[4], Book One, Chapter 15:

     One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness […]

   • 1926, Violet Hunt, “1910-11”, in The Flurried Years‎^[5], London: Hurst & Blackett, page 161:

     The room into which I was ushered, with its leering volutes and hideous bellyings of brown mahogany, intimately reminded me of a Beardsley drawing.

Synonyms

• bulge
• convexity
• gibbosity
• protrusion
• protuberance