Skip to content
OneKitly

barking

verbadjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɑːkɪŋ//
  • United States//ˈbɑɹkɪŋ//

The action of the verb to bark.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of barkpresent participle and gerund of bark

Etymology

From Middle English berkyng, berkande, equivalent to bark + -ing.

adjective

  1. 1

    Variant of barking madslangClipping of barking mad.

    He’s going to run the marathon in this hot weather dressed as Donald Duck – he must be barking!

noun

  1. 1

    The action of the verb to bark.

    Old pigtailed seamen would tell of horseshoes found in the meat casks; of curious barkings and neighings heard in the slaughter-houses; and of negroes who disappeared near the victualling yards, to be seen no more.

Etymology

From Middle English berkyng, berking, berkynge, equivalent to bark + -ing.

Forms

plural
barkings
comparative
more barking
superlative
most barking
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).