railing

comparative more railing · superlative most railing

1. That rails; engaged in or given to violent complaining.

   Why does that railing man go with us?

   1647, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher·, The CoxComb

   3 more examples

   The daring of the railing reviler should be checked with moderation, i.e. as a duty of charity, and not through lust for one's own honour.

   1918, Saint Thomas (Aquinas), The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, page 288

   A clamorous, debating, railing woman feels the need to have the last word.

   2013, Paige Coleman, Delivering Women from the Snares of Death, page 52

   On Anger's self-awareness of the originality of writing as a railing woman, see McManus, "Eve's Dowry," p. 198.

   2016, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617

2. Filled with invective and violent complaints

   Such was the case of the 'very railing speeches against the justices' by Thomas Holman, vintner, of Terling, Essex, when he was presented in 1608 'for a common drunkard and for keeping ill rule in his house'.

   2010, David Cressy, Dangerous Talk, page 27

   2 more examples

   Petrus de Pilichdorf (in the year 1395, as he himself gives the date, cap 30,) writes a book of confutation of the several pretended errors of the Waldenses of this time in thirty-six chapters, but has nothing of baptism; though he descends to speak of many lesser matters, and aggravates all with very railing words, yet he finds nothing to accuse them of, but such things as the protestants now hold, except one or two, as the 'unlawfulness of 'all oaths,' &c.

   1844, William Wall, The history of infant-baptism, page 267

   I return to earlier considerations of railing by looking at the ways in which the railing style of the Poets' War yields a significant, perverse, even queer fin de siècle aesthetics that is expressed in part by extreme articulations of masculinity: metaphors and puns represent men as either hyperagressive or effeminate.

   2016, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617, page 104

3. Blowing violently.

   Had I a garden, claustral yews Should shut out railing wind,

   1906, Alfred Austin, The Garden that I Love, page 113

   2 more examples

   But scatter to the railing wind Each gloomy phantom of the mind!

   1820, Anacreon, Odes of Anacreon - Volume 2, page 45

   Beginning way back in October, one railing storm after another had swept down off the Bitterroot Mountains and into the valley where the Rocking R had stood for three generations.

   2015, Rosanne Croft, Linda Reinhardt, Sharon Bernash Smith, Once Upon a Christmas

plural railings

1. A fence or barrier consisting of one or more horizontal rails and vertical supports.

   During the war, everyone's railings were taken away to make bombers.

   1 more example

   We passed through an inner courtyard overladen with fake wrought-iron railings and accents badly in need of a paint job, evoking a kind of Woolworth's Vieux Carré.

   1989, The Advocate, numbers 515-521, page 28

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of rail