[f. as prec. + -ING2.] That flounders; plunging and tossing; stumbling. Also fig.
1592. Nash, Pierce Penilesse, E ij b. Report (which our moderners clippe flundring Fame) puts me in memorie of a notable iest.
1642. H. More, Song of Soul, I. I. xvii. Th’ unruly flundring steeds wrought his confusion.
1852. Mrs. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s C., viii. The gray mist of evening, rising slowly from the river, enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and the swollen current and floundering masses of ice presented a hopeless barrier between her and her pursuer.
1887. T. A. Trollope, What I remember, I. xvii. 346. The postboys did their utmost bravely, but at the end of about five miles from Dover they dismounted from their floundering horses and declared the enterprise an impossible one.
1887. Saintsbury, Hist. Elizab. Lit., i. (1890), 12. There is nothing here of Wyatt’s floundering prosody, nothing of the well-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which his pupils simply revel.
