Crossword-Solution: GERUNDS 7 letters, 16 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

They had learned long lists of Latin words, with their meanings; they had wrestled in their teens with gerunds, supines, ablative absolutes and distracting rules about the subjunctive mood, and they had tried in vain to take an interest in stately authors far above their understanding.

The Spanish verbal forms ending in _ante_ and _iente_, as: Amante (lover), tratante (dealer), dependiente (clerk), etc., used to be termed "present participles," and the analogous forms "amando" (loving), "tratando" (treating), "dependiendo" (depending), etc., "gerunds," but this has now taken the place of both forms, used as verbs, and the forms in _ante_ and _iente_ are classed as other parts of speech, according to their meaning, as-- Amante de la música (_adj._): Fond of music.

But circumstances have led me to acquire at different times some practical acquaintance with Turkish and Finnish as well as a slight literary knowledge of Tamil and having these data I cannot help being struck by the general similarity shown in the structure both of words and of sentences (particularly the use of gerunds and the constructions which replace relative sentences) and by some resemblances in vocabulary.

The child, for instance, in parsing the sentence, "The swing broke down," must be taught to look for essential characteristics, and not call the word _swing_ a gerund because it ends in "ing"; which, though a common characteristic of gerunds, does not differentiate it from other classes of words.

Rosalie very often dreamed--when she ought to have been concentrating upon Latin grammar--of that happy future state in which smiles and kisses would take the place of gerunds and gerundives.