howling

plural howlings

1. The act of producing howls.

   The howling of wolves is haunting at night.

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of howl

   "They have turned a great old English institution into a shameful clip-joint. It's a shuddering, howling tragedy."

   2009 February 19, Gareth Lewis, Southern Daily Echo

1. not comparableThat howls.

   howling wind

   3 more examples

   A few minutes later a howling mob was at the door.

   1888, William Fraser Rae, A Modern Brigand

   We have already seen in Chapter I how man stepped upwards from the level of a howling brute to the higher level of an articulate being, and thence to the still higher level of a singing creature.

   1916, Charles Villiers Stanford, Cecil Forsyth, A History of Music, page 202

   It consisted of marching on to College green or St Stephen's green on a day when there was a howling gale and the wind was blowing about us –I am sure hon. Members today are familiar with this –to utter a few, well-chosen platitudes.

   1989, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard)., page 189

2. not comparableThat causes one to howl or feel like howling; deeply distressing.

   A pervasive sense of optimism led settlers in southern New Zealand to transform their properites from a 'howling wilderness' to a humanised rural landscape.

   2013, Peter Holland, A Home in the Howling Wilderness

   2 more examples

   Ah! the death of the poor, the empty entrails, howling hunger, the animal appetite that leads one with chattering teeth to fill one's stomach with beastly refuse in this great Paris, so bright and golden!

   1877, Émile Zola, L'Assommoir

   Some agency must control the allocation of frequencies or all our airways would be a howling chaos: but there is no rational justification for the kind of regulation that the Federal Communications Commission proposes for our industry.

   1966, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Regulation of Community Antenna Television, page 272

3. colloquialnot comparableUsed as an intensifier

   Boy, what a howling triumph if we should find our way out of here and go walking into Stark House by night !

   2022, Percy Keese Fitzhugh, The Doom of Stark House

   2 more examples

   Those were days that I had success, for I could see it, and feel it, and taste it, and my patrons caught the contagion and we had a howling success .

   1900, “Superstition and Success in the Practise of Medicin. A Breezy Chapter From a Young Contemporary”, in The Medical World, volume 18, page 446

   The majority of your audience comes to your tale with one hopeful expectation: Tell me a howling good story.

   2023, Wulf Moon, How to Write a Howling Good Story, page 1

1. A surname originating as a patronymic.