One way to picture it: the thing is quietly at you from across a room. You have not decided anything yet, but you can already feel yourself leaning towards it. Almost everything this word does is that pull. A place, a plan, or a price can wave at you and make you want it. A face or a voice can wave too, and then the wave is not offering something nice, it is asking you for something.
From the word’s history
The source analyses the word as appeal + -ing. Appeal is about calling out to someone, so appealing can be read as the thing doing the calling.
來源把這個字拆成 appeal 加 -ing。appeal 本身有「呼喚、請求」的意思，所以 appealing 可以讀成「正在呼喚你的那一方」。這條線剛好把兩種用法接起來：一種是東西在喚你過去，一種是人在喚你幫忙。
Wiktionary entry 'appealing' (kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:462425536): By surface analysis, appeal + -ing.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
appealingadj/əˈpiː.lɪŋ/
- 1
Having appeal; attractive.
- Her housecoat had fallen open. She was wearing only panties and bra, which did nothing to make her scrawny, wrinkled body appealing.
- Some of the most beautiful and thus appealing physical theories, including quantum electrodynamics and quantum gravity, have been dogged for decades by infinities that erupt when theorists try to prod their calculations into new domains. Getting rid of these nagging infinities has probably occupied far more effort than was spent in originating the theories.
appealingnoun/əˈpiː.lɪŋ/
- 1
The act of making an appeal.
- The fair creature abandoned her position, and in the midst of her bitter tears and pathetic appealings, which my sense of duty alone enabled me to resist, I bore my prisoner off.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。