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startling

verbadjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈstɑː.tl̩.ɪŋ//
  • United Kingdom//ˈstɑːt.lɪŋ//
  • United States//ˈstɑɹ.tl̩.ɪŋ//
  • United States//ˈstɑɹt.lɪŋ//

Likely to startle; surprising; shocking.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of startlepresent participle and gerund of startle

adjective

  1. 1

    Likely to startle; surprising; shocking.

    That startling admission capped a miserable night for City as they arrived in Germany following an unbeaten start to the season.

noun

  1. 1

    A startle; a sudden motion or shock.

    Soon the formications and muscular debility returned, not alone, but accompanied with painful cramps and startlings in the feet and calves of the legs.

Forms

plural
startlings
comparative
more startling
superlative
most startling
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).