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Spelunking is the activity of exploring caves for fun — going down into the ground, climbing over rocks, squeezing through tight gaps, all in the dark with a lamp on your head. It is used as a noun ('Spelunking is dangerous', 'We went spelunking last weekend') and you will also meet it as the -ing form of a verb, 'to spelunk', though that verb is far less common and sounds a bit playful. This is American English. In Britain people say 'caving', or 'potholing' when the cave goes down. The word has a slightly light, amateur feel to it — serious cave explorers often prefer to say 'caving' about what they do. It is also used as a joke for hunting around in dark places: someone digging deep into an bag might say they are 'spelunking' in it. Interestingly, the word came AFTER 'spelunker': people already had a name for the person, then made a name for the activity by cutting the word down and adding -ing.
洞穴探險（這項活動）；英式英語說 caving
組成spelunk + -ing。這裡的來源方向和一般人想的相反：先有 spelunker（人），才回頭切出 spelunk 再加 -ing 造出這個字（語言學叫「逆構詞」back-formation），1946 年開始有紀錄。
同家族的字
- spelunkerthe person; this word was made from it
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，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。
spelunkingnoun
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The practice or hobby of exploring underground caverns.
- In the great myths, the adventures are external, even when they involve such metaphorical spelunkings as the voyage into the underworld.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。