ailing

plural ailings

1. An ailment.

   When you're well enough off so's you don't have to fret about anything but your heft or your diseases you begin to get queer, I suppose. And the queerer the cure for those ailings the bigger the attraction. A place like the Right Livers' Rest was bound to draw freaks, same as molasses draws flies.

   1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter V, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of ail

comparative more ailing · superlative most ailing

1. Sickly; sick; ill; unwell.

   She cared for her ailing brother day in, day out.

   2 more examples

   Poppydawn had taken to sleeping outside the apprentices' den, too worried to leave her ailing kit.

   2009, Erin Hunter [pseudonym; Erin Hunter Team], Warriors Super Edition: Bluestar's Prophecy, page 275

   Based on the successful Class 59 but with a much more modern engine, what was to become the Class 66 was designed to replace much of the company's elderly and ailing locomotive fleet.

   2021 February 24, “Fleet News: Class 66 history”, in RAIL, number 925, page 27