bellying

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of belly

1. not comparableBulging or billowing.

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

   1925, Hugh Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, Part I, Chapter 6

   3 more examples

   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?

   1908 October, Kenneth Grahame, chapter 9, in The Wind in the Willows, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →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 […]

   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

   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.

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

plural bellyings

1. A bulging, swelling or billowing shape; the act or state of bulging, swelling or billowing.

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

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

   3 more examples

   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, 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, 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;

   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 […]

   1898, H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Book One, Chapter 15

   Synonyms: bulge, convexity, gibbosity, protrusion, protuberance