yawning
English edit
Pronunciation edit
Verb edit
yawning
- present participle and gerund of yawn
Noun edit
yawning (countable and uncountable, plural yawnings)
- The action of the verb yawn.
- 1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter IX, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 189:
- 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.
Adjective edit
yawning (comparative more yawning, superlative most yawning)
- That yawns or yawn.
- yawning commuters
- (figuratively) Wide open.
- a yawning chasm; the shark's yawning jaws
- 2007 November, Gil Schwartz, “Escape from the job monster”, in Men's Health, volume 22, number 9, →ISSN, page 122:
- 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.
- 2013 August 3, “The machine of a new soul”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
- 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.
- 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, , page 1:
- But always and ever there is a yawning chasm below[.]