Buckling
adj, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act of fastening a buckle.
- 2 A young male domestic goat of between one and two years.
"1994, Carla Emery, The Encyclopedia of Country Living, Ninth Edition, Sasquatch Books, →ISBN, page 715, If you do have extra milk, then by all means raise your extra bucklings and cull doelings for meat."
- 3 Smoked herring.
- 4 A folding into hills and valleys.
- 5 The action of giving in (slightly) to pressure or stress by developing a bulge, bending or kinking (with the eventual risk of collapsing).
"Engineers decided not to use hydraulics, to ensure there was no twisting or buckling to the 80-tonne girder structure."
- 1 present participle and gerund of buckle form-of, gerund, participle, present
- 1 Wavy; curly, as hair.
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"The leader of the new republic is buckling under political pressures."
Etymology
From the verb to buckle, equivalent to buckle + -ing.
From buck + -ling.
From German Bückling or Swedish böckling. Cognate with Middle High German bockinc and Middle Dutch bocking (itself from bok (“buck”), referencing the foul smell).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.