addressing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of address.

   He spent the morning addressing parcels for the shipping company.

   Addressing the council, she outlined her plan for the new park.

   Note

   Today the verb needs an object. You are addressing someone, a parcel or a problem. Its intransitive uses, "preparing oneself" and "directing speech," are obsolete. The reflexive construction is still alive. Addressing oneself to a task means applying one's energies to it. Addressing oneself to a person means directing one's remarks to them. Avoid "addressing to the crowd" with no object; write "addressing the crowd" or "addressing oneself to the crowd."

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The task of marking letters, parcels, and other mail with the name and address of the person they are going to.

   Careful addressing ensures each parcel reaches the correct recipient.

   The company outsources the addressing of its monthly statements.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   In computing, any of various schemes a system uses to find and retrieve particular data held in memory or storage.

   The processor's addressing determines how quickly it can fetch stored values.

   Memory addressing schemes vary between different hardware architectures.

   Note

   A computing word for how a machine finds what it has stored. Each location has an address, and addressing is the method of getting from that address to the data. It often works as a modifier, as in memory addressing or an addressing scheme. It is usually uncountable unless particular methods are being compared. It shares only an idea with the mail-labeling sense: a place that can be named and found.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A mode, manner, or form of direct speech delivered to an audience.

   The general's blunt addressing of the troops conveyed real urgency.

   Public addressing in ceremonial settings often follows strict conventions.

   Similarspeech, oratory

   Note

   A linguist's term for how speech is pitched at its hearers, especially how it marks social rank. R. S. Perinbanayagam's Discursive Acts (2010) warns that a social inferior should not adopt a domineering "structure of words and addressings." A superior, meanwhile, must judge just the right degree of condescension. Note the plural there. The word is usually uncountable, but it becomes countable when individual acts or forms of address are meant.

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