[f. BLEED + -ING2.]
1. Losing or emitting blood, or transf. sap.
a. 1225. Ancr. R., 118. Bledinde mon is grislich.
1398. Trevisa, Barth. De P. R., V. xxii. (1495), 129. A bledynge wounde.
1703. Rowe, Ulysses, IV. i. 1706. That poor bleeding King.
1787. Winter, Syst. Husb., 45. Thistles … cut close to the ground, are destroyed by scattering soaper’s ashes over the bleeding stumps.
b. Running or suffused with blood.
c. 1305. Leg. Rood (1871), 133. Bounden . in bledyng bondes.
1595. Shaks., John, II. i. 304. Whose sonnes lye scattered on the bleeding ground.
2. fig. a. Full of anguish from suffering, deep pity, or compassion.
1596. Spenser, F. Q., I. vii. 38. These bleeding words she gan to say.
1597. Hooker, Eccl. Pol., V. xlii. § 2. With bleeding hearts.
1628. Feltham, Resolves, I. lxi. (1647), 189. Calamities that challenge a bleeding eye.
1688. N. N., Old Popery, 4. I could not without Compassionate and Bleeding Thoughts see and hear of so many Persons of Sober and Vertuous Lives.
1713. Guardian, No. 31 (1756), I. 134. All those good-natured offices that could have been expected from the most bleeding pity.
b. metaphor. Obs.
1597. Shaks., Lover’s Compl., 153. Experience for me many bulwarkes builded Of proofs new bleeding.
a. 1674. Clarendon, Hist. Reb., I. v. 387. Cruelty … of which they every day received fresh and bleeding evidence.
3. fig. and transf. Said of nations devastated by war or the like, etc. Also, as in BLEED 5 b.
1668. Dryden, Even. Love, IV. i. This is the Folly of a bleeding Gamester.
a. 1674. Clarendon, Hist. Reb., I. v. 537. The relief of bleeding and miserable Ireland.
1689. Luttrell, Brief Rel. (1857), I. 503. The bleeding condition of Ireland.
1863. Mary Howitt, trans. F. Bremer’s Greece, I. i. 9. Greece herself, bleeding and exhausted after her efforts in the War of Liberation.
4. quasi-adv. (Cf. 2 b.)
1607. Shaks., Timon, I. ii. 80. So they were bleeding new my Lord, there’s no meet like ’em.
5. Comb. bleeding-heart, the popular name for several plants; e.g., the Wallflower (Cheiranthus Cheiri), the Aristotelia peduncularis, Colocasia esculenta of the Sandwich Islands, Dicentra formosa, and a variety of Cherry (Miller); bleeding root = BLOOD-ROOT.
1714. Phil. Trans., XXIX. 64. The root call’d the Bleeding Root, curing the Jaundies.
1863. Prior, Plant-n., 24.
