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stirring

adjectiveverbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈstɜːɹɪŋ//
  • United States//ˈstɝɪŋ//

invigorating or inspiring

adjective

  1. 1

    invigorating or inspiring

    As he had said, his voice was hoarse, but he sang well enough, and it was a stirring tune, something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucaracha'.

    But Chelsea, who left Didier Drogba on the bench as coach Carlo Ancelotti favoured Fernando Torres, staged a stirring fightback to move up to fourth and keep United in their sights on a night when nothing other than victory would have kept the Blues in contention.

    On Friday night Dion delivered a stirring rendition of the 1950 song accompanied by a pianist, with the Olympics rings above her.

Etymology

By surface analysis, stir + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of stirpresent participle and gerund of stir

noun

  1. 1

    An occasion on which something stirs or is stirred

    The reduction takes the central bank back to where it was in December 2005, when it began raising its key rate despite objections from some political figures and many economists about choking the early stirrings of a recovery in growth.

Forms

plural
stirrings
comparative
more stirring
superlative
most stirring
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).