OK, you know in the movies and stuff when a big flying beast is about to land and it changes how it's flapping it's wings from a down-and-up pattern to a sort of back and forth motion? Like here in this video at the 0:44-46 second mark. Am I just making this up, or is "The dragon backwinged to a landing" a legit thing I can use in my writing? Google Docs keeps telling me "backwinged" isn't a word. I'm just concerned that maybe some other author coined it and I don't want to get in trouble for using it.
I think you can just say landed. Like, in the Song of Ice and Fire books (Game of Thrones etc), I'm pretty sure when a dragon lands on something that's just the word that is used. You can safely let the reader's imagination do the work. But if you use a word like "backwinged" there's a risk you'll pull the reader out of their immersion and remind them that somewhere there was an author desperately seeking the technical term for a flying creature landing.
A Google really only gave me a Wiktionary article that recognized the word, and some pictures (one on DeviantArt for example) titled "Backwinging Dragon". So as far as I can tell it doesn't seem to be an official word. No entries in online versions of Webster or anything official like that. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/backwing#English The only other option would be to describe the action I guess. If you search "backwinging duck" or "goose", it seems to be relatively common parlance in some niche communities.
"the dragon flared its wings for landing" - big birds do it all the time, you watch a buzzard or an eagle land they turn their wings to act as airbrakes to cut their forward momentum
You could say the dragon ‘flared’ its wings. Flared = broaden, widen, spread. A plane or helicopter ‘flares’ before landing.