Climbing is the sport of going up rock faces and walls using your hands and feet. Go climbing, indoor climbing, a climbing wall.
The word splits into named disciplines that a learner will meet at any centre: bouldering is short routes without ropes over mats, sport climbing uses fixed bolts, and trad climbing places its own protection. Mountaineering is the wider activity of getting up mountains. Note that climbing is also the ordinary gerund of climb — climbing the stairs — and that climbing plants are ones that grow upwards on a support.
1nounclimbingThe sport of going up rock faces or walls.
“She took up climbing at forty and got good quickly.”
2nounactThe act of going up something.
“The climbing was the easy part; getting down was not.”
climbing is a sport or activity.
Also accepted in games: rock climbing
Old English climban belongs to a small group of verbs about gripping — the same root may lie behind clamber and cleave. English kept a strong past, clomb, into the nineteenth century before settling on climbed.
Middle English
clymbyng
English, today
climbing
From Middle English clymbyng, clymbynge; equivalent to climb + -ing.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA