beetling

beetling

1. present participle and gerund of beetle

beetling (plural beetlings)

1. The process by which fabrics, etc. are beetled, or beaten with a mallet.

beetling (not comparable)

1. Jutting or protruding, especially of a person's brows.
   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     As I anticipated, we had passed right through the precipice, and were now on the farther side, and immediately beneath its beetling face.

   • 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London, New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:

     The beetling head of the cliff projected over the cane-brake.

   • 1960, Stewart Alsop, “How They Got that Way: Nixon”, in Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, →OCLC, page 124:

     Put a clay pipe in [Richard] Nixon’s mouth and a hod on his shoulder or a shillelagh in his hand, and there, complete with beetling brows and uptilted nose, is the original of the old cartoon stereotype of the fighting Irishman—the Irishman of the draft riots or of Punch’s version of the Sinn Feiner.

   • 1995, Iain Banks, Whit:

     If the fire, with its giant black kettle swung over the flames, is our never-extinguished shrine, then the stove is an altar. It is habitually tended by my step-aunt Calliope (usually known as Calli), a dark, stocky, dense-looking woman with beetling black brows and a tied-back sheaf of thick hair, still raven-black without a trace of silver after her forty-four years.