yawning

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of yawn

plural yawnings

1. countableuncountableThe action of the verb yawn.

   Her vivacity appeared as graceful as it was buoyant; her gay spirit seemed the musical overflowings of youth and happiness; her eye and cheek brightened together; and her sweet glad laugh was as catching as yawning.

   1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter IX, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 189

comparative more yawning · superlative most yawning

1. That yawns or yawn.

   yawning commuters

2. figurativelyWide open.

   a yawning chasm; the shark's yawning jaws

   3 more examples

   That experience really taught me something. That deep down inside, I am broken, and that I'm using work to plaster over some yawning gap within myself.

   2007 November, Gil Schwartz, “Escape from the job monster”, in Men's Health, volume 22, number 9, →ISSN, page 122

   The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what.

   2013 August 3, “The machine of a new soul”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847

   But always and ever there is a yawning chasm below[.]

   2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 1