LINGERING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does lingering mean? 

• LINGERING (noun)
  The noun LINGERING has 1 sense:

1. the act of tarrying

  Familiarity information: LINGERING used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LINGERING (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The act of tarrying

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

lingering; tarriance

Hypernyms ("lingering" is a kind of...):

delay; holdup (the act of delaying; inactivity resulting in something being put off until a later time)

 Context examples 

Yet a chance traveller might pass by; and I wish no eye to see me now: strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here at the sign-post, evidently objectless and lost.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I felt reluctant to be present, when Mr. Peggotty first met his sister and Ham; and made Mr. Omer my excuse for lingering behind.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Meantime the old king was lingering on in daily hope of his son’s return, till at last the second son said, “Father, I will go in search of the Water of Life.”

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

Send a man to the wheel, Mr. Van Weyden, keep this course for the present, and you might as well set the watches, for we won’t do any lingering to-night.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

A lingering question surrounds the original source of the water that carried sediment into the crater.

(NASA's Curiosity Rover Team Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars, NASA)

Oh! Not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

There was not the faintest whisper of air—nothing moved, not a leaf quivered, the visible breaths of the dogs rising slowly and lingering in the frosty air.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

He drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long and lingering exhalation.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It was not yet dark, and in the lingering twilight he groped about among the rocks for shreds of dry moss.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)