I've looked up some dictionaries online, but they list "croon" as either a verb or a noun. Can "crooning" be used as an adjective?
For example, She sat listening to a soft, crooning song.
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Sign up to join this communityI've looked up some dictionaries online, but they list "croon" as either a verb or a noun. Can "crooning" be used as an adjective?
For example, She sat listening to a soft, crooning song.
Yes (and no).
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists examples of crooning as an adjective as far back as 1599:
Be cruining Bulls of heigh and haughtie minde.
Cruining is just an older, alternative spelling of crooning. There were many alternative spellings of words before dictionaries. That example is by Alexander Hugh from Hymnes, or sacred songs.
George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede in 1859
The cocks and hens..made only crooning subdued noises.
The inimitable PG Wodehouse wrote in Blandings Castle (1935)
Everybody knows what Crooning Tenors are... They sit at the piano and gaze into a girl's eyes and sing in a voice that sounds like gas escaping from a pipe about Love and the Moonlight and You.
But of course he is writing facetiously and often used modifiers in ways such as using them before objects when describing the actor/subject: he put the rueful kettle on the stove, such that that which is rueful is the one who put the kettle on, not the kettle (which is an example I made up, but not unlike how Wodehouse used adjectives).
In short, yes you can say
She sat listening to a soft, crooning song.
But, some readers may not think it a very good usage, if they think that it is not really the song that is crooning, but the singer of the song. So it may come across as having the same effect as that of a dangling or other misplaced modifier. If I were writing this sentence I might choose a different way to write it, so that it avoids the use of crooning as modifying song. To many, a song doesn't croon; a singer does.
Your example is flawed in two ways. Croon; is "soft, low voice or tone" and related to being melodic and musical. So, 'soft, crooning song' says the same thing, three times. It is redundant. "She sat listening to the crooning wind move through the forest." would work though.