assembling

Pluralassemblings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of assemble.

   Volunteers were assembling care packages for the flood victims.

   Assembling the furniture took longer than anyone had expected.

   Note

   One spelling does two grammatical jobs. After be it builds the progressive (they were assembling), and on its own it works as a gerund, filling a noun slot (assembling the furniture took hours). It carries every meaning of assemble: putting parts together, a group gathering, and the programmer's sense of turning assembly language into machine code. The gathering sense is ergative, so a crowd can be assembling, or someone can be assembling a crowd.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A gathering or coming together of people in one place.

   An assembling of scholars convened to debate the surprising new findings.

   The morning assembling of workers blocked the factory gates in protest.

   Similargathering, assembly, meeting, congregation

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this is a true countable noun. It takes a plural, assemblings, and can be counted occasion by occasion. Thomas Stackhouse's An epitome of the history, laws, and religion of Greece (1824) writes of "the annual assemblings of the people to sacrifice" at the graves of the dead. There each recurring gathering is one assembling, close in meaning to assembly.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2