scrambling

(linguistics): Coined by American linguist John R. Ross in 1967.

scrambling

1. present participle and gerund of scramble

   The Air Force is scrambling the fighter jets.

   When you start scrambling eggs, look first for tiny pieces of eggshell that might have fallen in.

scrambling (countable and uncountable, plural scramblings)

1. The act by which something is scrambled.

   The scrambling of the message made it harder to decode.

2. (climbing) Ascending steep terrain using one's hands to assist in holds and balance.
3. (linguistics) The ability of a language to reorder arguments within a clause without changing the core meaning or violating grammaticality.
   • 1994, Sten Vikner, “Scandinavian object shift and West Germanic scrambling”, in Norbert Corver, Henk van Riemsdijk, editors, Studies on Scrambling […] , Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 488:

     As all the Germanic languages are V2 languages (except English, which also has neither object shift nor scrambling), and as as the examples are main clauses without auxiliary verbs, the main verb has moved to C.

scrambling (comparative more scrambling, superlative most scrambling)

1. Confused and irregular; awkward; scambling.
   • 1826, [Walter Scott], Woodstock; Or, The Cavalier. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, →OCLC:

     A huge old scrambling bedroom.

2. (botany) Having a stem too weak to support itself, instead attaching to and relying on the stems or trunks of stronger plants.
   • 1998, Kerp with Hans and Michael Krings, “Climbing and scrambling growth habits: common life strategies among Late Carboniferous seed ferns”, in Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences (IIA-Earth and Planetary Science 326.8), pages 583-588:

     All three types of climbing organs here demonstrated for Late Palaeozoic seed ferns are also found in modern angiosperms. This leads to the conclusion that several taxa of Late Palaeozoic seed ferns were well-adapted to climbing and scrambling growth habits.

• scrambling dragon