flounder

1. 1.

   walk with great difficulty

   “He staggered along in the heavy snow”

   Synonymsstagger

   Broaderwalk
2. 2.

   behave awkwardly; have difficulties

   “She is floundering in college”

   Broaderfight

Other forms of flounder

plural

flounders·

past tense

flounderred·

present participle

flounderring·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about flounder

What does flounder mean?

flounder means "flesh of any of various American and European flatfish". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in flounder?

flounder has 2 syllables: floun-der. The stress falls on "floun". In IPA it is /ˈflaʊndɚ/.

What is another word for flounder?

Close synonyms include stagger. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is flounder a common word?

flounder is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.