yawning

• IPA^(key): /ˈjɔːnɪŋ/

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• Rhymes: -ɔːnɪŋ

yawning

1. present participle and gerund of yawn

yawning (countable and uncountable, plural yawnings)

1. 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.

yawning (comparative more yawning, superlative most yawning)

1. That yawns or yawn.

   yawning commuters

2. (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, →DOI, page 1:

     But always and ever there is a yawning chasm below[.]

• yawningly
• yawningness