NURSING • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Nursing

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/nˈərsɪŋ/ Listen

verb

Nurse v. t. (past & past part. nursed; pres. part. nursing)

To nourish; to cherish; to foster; as:

(a)

To nourish at the breast; to suckle; to feed and tend, as an infant.

(b)

To take care of or tend, as a sick person or an invalid; to attend upon. "Sons wont to nurse their parents in old age." "Him in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nursed his youth along the marshy shore."

To bring up; to raise, by care, from a weak or invalid condition; to foster; to cherish; applied to plants, animals, and to any object that needs, or thrives by, attention. "To nurse the saplings tall." "By what hands (has vice) been nursed into so uncontrolled a dominion?"

To manage with care and economy, with a view to increase; as, to nurse our national resources.

To caress; to fondle, as a nurse does.

To nurse billiard balls, to strike them gently and so as to keep them in good position during a series of caroms.

adjective

Nursing adj. Supplying or taking nourishment from, or as from, the breast; as, a nursing mother; a nursing infant.

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Etymology of 'Nursing'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Nursing" Quotes from Famous Books

... bestow on their own young. Not only so, but they apparently discover that the methods of feeding, which suit their own larvae, would prove fatal to the guests, and accordingly they change their whole system of nursing" (loc. cit., p. 106). ...

— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the ruins—the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were nursing your wound, ...

— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... down the worn stone steps. As we sped seawards across the bleak country, our thoughts flew back to her, and to the little room with the red cross on its casement, wherein, although our prisoners were released, another term of nursing had already begun for her. In contrast with her life of cheerful self-abnegation, ours ...

— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... the second day of our confinement that a wild, beautiful girl burst into the Calabooza, and, throwing herself into an arch attitude, stood afar off, and gazed at us. She was a heartless one:—tickled to death with Black Dan's nursing his chafed ankle, and indulging in certain moral reflections on the consul and Captain Guy. After laughing her fill at him, she condescended to notice the rest; glancing from one to another in the most methodical ...

— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... night. Mary was taken away to Bruxelles. I have seen Mary frequently since. She is in no ways crushed by the event; but while Martha was ill, she was to her more than a mother—more than a sister: watching, nursing, cherishing her so tenderly, so unweariedly. She appears calm and serious now; no bursts of violent emotion; no exaggeration of distress. I have seen Martha's grave—the place where her ashes lie ...

— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

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