Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Awkward; cumbrous; heavy in action; encumbering.
  • Rumbling.
  • noun The business of cutting timber in a forest and preparing it for market.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun U.S. The business of cutting or getting timber or logs from the forest for lumber.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun US The business of felling trees for lumber.
  • adjective Clumsy or awkward.
  • adjective Heavy, slow and laborious; ponderous.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective slow and laborious because of weight
  • noun the trade of cutting or preparing or selling timber

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • The buildings look animate, Elizabeth, as though they are about to begin lumbering forward — perhaps to scrape against the wires in order to remove the barnacles.

    apartments | clusterflock 2009

  • I am a huge fan of fast, movie style fiction, so the slow lumbering is too much for me.

    The Life Counted In Pages Meme - by Joanna Penn | The Creative Penn 2009

  • Didn't you see the 263 word lumbering monster of a comment I painfully and needlessly deposited late yesterday evening.

    Urban Tools: Curatorial Commitment BikeSnobNYC 2010

  • Conservative lumbering, which is the term used by foresters to designate the opposite of wasteful lumbering, will be described more fully later in this study.

    Studies of Trees Jacob Joshua Levison

  • Before the eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Hume against a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage out of Selden.

    Some Diversions of a Man of Letters Edmund Gosse 1888

  • Brockman: Yes, well … Homer, organized labor has been called a lumbering dinosaur …

    The Big Lead 2010

  • Brockman: Yes, well … Homer, organized labor has been called a lumbering dinosaur …

    The Big Lead 2010

  • In further bilingual fun, Lucille Ball on an old Jack Benny TV show (rerun Sept. 24, 1981) dubbed lumbering John Wayne "El Klutzo" [kluhts, var. of klots ` log '].

    VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol X No 2 1983

  • The foot through the motel lifted off like some kind of lumbering rocket ship.

    Archive 2009-10-01 2009

  • The foot through the motel lifted off like some kind of lumbering rocket ship.

    Dragon Came to Galveston to Die 2009

Comments

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  • And your second choice, Barnaby?

    My second choice is Maréchal, me voilà! by François Mitterand. In his unusually candid autobiography, the man who was to become President of France ruefully admits that if he had known how the Second World War was going to turn out, he would probably have chosen the other side. In a delightful postscript he writes that he now regrets lumbering the French taxpayer with the cost of running two households.

    http://capeldunn.blogspot.com/2010/10/desert-island-books.html

    October 22, 2010

  • My adjectival use: 'The load was falling off the lumbering cart.'

    August 22, 2011