wooing

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of woo

   A man giving a gift of roses is wooing a woman.

plural wooings

1. A courting; the process by which somebody is wooed.

   "Sweet soul! I know his appetite," said Mrs. Mallowe. "Did he, oh did he, begin his wooing?"

   1889, Rudyard Kipling, “The Education of Otis Yeere”, in Under the Deodars, Boston: The Greenock Press, published 1899, page 10

   3 more examples

   She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her now wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal presentation as lover.

   1891, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, volume 1, London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., page 36

   She was like a Beardsley Salome, he had said. And indeed she had the narrow eyes and the high cheekbone of that creature, and as nearly the sinuosity as is compatible with human symmetry. His wooing had been brief but incisive.

   1921, Ben Travers, chapter 1, in A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC

   The difference here is that the protagonists in this collection are, for the most part, at the end of their lives, and so the news of familial drama and divorce and the cocktail parties, barbecues and casual wooings of quotidian life in suburbia is given retrospectively, wistfully, presented in the larger context as memories of lost moments and lost opportunities.

   2009 June 7, T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Road Home”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Jan 2021