Crossword-Solution: GERUND 6 letters, 31 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to worldly wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed, than it does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more practical than a gerund or a cosine.

His history of Friar Gerund, which slightly resembles Don Quixote, aimed a blow at bombastic oratory, causing it soon to die out.

Jenkins, for whose sturdy common sense, however, he had sincere respect; and long after, in his Vikram and the Vampire, in which he satirises the tutors and gerund-grinders of Oxford, he paid him a compliment.

This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s student who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or dismantling a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again, a modern speaker would substitute the verb form of "goof"-"goofing" or "goofing off"-to describe the same activity.

They uttered a phrase every quarter of an hour, prepared with difficulty, and in which the gerund of the verb, no doubt according to the grammatical turn of their own languages, was constantly employed.