BUSTLING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does bustling mean? 

• BUSTLING (adjective)
  The adjective BUSTLING has 1 sense:

1. full of energetic and noisy activity

  Familiarity information: BUSTLING used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• BUSTLING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Full of energetic and noisy activity

Context example:

a bustling city

Similar:

active (full of activity or engaged in continuous activity)

 Context examples 

As for myself, I am glad to have got the bustling days of preparation and the pangs of leave-taking behind me, and I have no doubt that I show it in my bearing.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

‘Come, come!’ said he, in his bustling way.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Not at all, with Hannah bustling about and covering you with flour.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He was away faggot-cutting in the forest, but his wife, a ruddy bustling dame, found the needful garments and tied them into a bundle.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

In the mean time Sir Lothian Hume had come bustling up to the Honourable Berkeley Craven, who was still standing near our curricle.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I’ve had a bustling afternoon, I promise you.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was indeed our visitor of the afternoon who came bustling in, dangling his glasses more vigorously than ever, and with a very perturbed expression upon his aristocratic features.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

"Mother and I are going to wait for John. There are some last things to settle," said Meg, bustling away.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to me—the brief commands, the shrill note of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ship's lanterns.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is bustling with young and old stars, smaller black holes and other varieties of stellar corpses — all swarming around a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*.

(NASA's NuSTAR Captures Possible 'Screams' from Zombie Stars, NASA)