pleading

plural pleadings

1. countableuncountableThe act of making a plea.

   But it pleased her to play on my passion / And whet me to pleadings / That won from her mirthful negations / And scornings undue.

   1909, Thomas Hardy, The Flirt's Tragedy

2. countableuncountablelawA document filed in a lawsuit, particularly a document initiating litigation or responding to the initiation of litigation.

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of plead

comparative more pleading · superlative most pleading

1. That pleads.

   With a pleading look, she raised her eyes to him.

   1999, Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, page 599

   3 more examples

   Franchise, relaxed and soothed by the vagueness of a surrender set so far in the future, simply took hold of his two hands to make him behave himself and looked at him with her pretty pleading eyes — the eyes of a sensitive woman who didn't want to risk having a child by anyone but her husband.

   1955, Émile Zola, Ann Lindsay, Earth, page 251

   Have but a pleading heart and God will have a plenteous hand.

   1993, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Psalms, page 225

   Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.

   2013 June 22, “Engineers of a different kind”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, page 70