actioning

Pluralactionings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of action.

   The support team is actioning every ticket before the deadline.

   Managers spent the week actioning feedback from the survey.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. After be it is a participle (the team is actioning every ticket), and elsewhere it is a gerund working as a noun (actioning feedback took all week). Either way it is transitive and wants an object: you action a request, a ticket, a complaint. An older, now archaic use meant bringing a legal action against someone. Once it drops its object and takes a plural, it has become the noun for an instance of acting.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act or process of taking action on something, such as a task or request.

   The actioning of customer complaints improved after the new system launched.

   Prompt actioning of safety reports prevented several accidents on the site.

   Similarhandling, processing, implementation

   Note

   The noun works both ways, as a mass noun and as a count noun. As a mass noun it names the handling of something and usually takes of: the actioning of complaints. The plural turns up in academic prose that pluralizes -ing words freely. Pierre Legrand's Negative Comparative Law (2022) lines up "interrogatings, actionings, and understandings" together. In that company the counted form reads as a deliberate, theoretical coinage rather than everyday office English.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2