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billowing

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,846 of 15,258neutral

Billowing means swelling and rolling outward in great soft waves. Smoke, sails, curtains, a long skirt in the wind.

The size is what the word promises, since a billow is a large rolling wave and nothing small billows. It suits smoke above all, and billowing smoke is close to a fixed phrase in news reports. Fabric billows when air gets under it, which is what makes it such a favourite of photographers. The verb is billow and the noun is a billow.

Definitions of billowing

  1. 1adjectivebillowingSwelling and rolling outward in large soft waves.C1

    “Billowing smoke could be seen from the next village.”

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *bʰelǵʰ-

  2. Old Norse

    bylgja

  3. Middle English

    *bilwe

  4. English

    billow

  5. English, today

    billowing

billow comes from Middle English bilwe, from Old Norse bylgja. From Middle English bilwe, borrowed from Old Norse bylgja, from Proto-Germanic bulgijō. Cognates include Danish bølge (“wave”); Norwegian Bokmål bølge (“wave”), Norwegian Nynorsk bylgje (“wave”); Swedish bölja (“wave”); German Low German Bulge, Bulg, Bülg (“billow, wave”); German Bulge (“billow, wave”). Compare bellow, bawl.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 5 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

billowing in the wild

  • Throughout its run, it billed itself as "Britain's bubbling new comic!", a reference to the title masthead being made up of steam-billowing pipes (hence the title).

    Hoot (comics)

  • Many had taken cover in their vehicles but suffocated as billowing black smoke engulfed the basement levels.

    Jakarta Stock Exchange bombing

  • The galaxies occur in two clumps, while the gas has expanded into a billowing cloud encompassing all three clumps.

    Bullet Group

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the bylgja family

billowbillowing

billowing — used about once every 33,333 pages · #13,846 · point at the bar for the others