axing

Pluralaxings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of axe.

   The network is axing several long-running series next season.

   Management defended axing the project despite the public outcry.

   Note

   Behind the participle stands a verb with more than one edge. Axing trees is the literal felling and chopping. Axing a series or a project is the figurative cut: laying off or canceling, often roughly or ruthlessly. A rarer use means fitting something with an axle. Older writing also used this spelling for the dialect form of 'asking', a use now obsolete.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of ax.

   Editors worried that axing the column would alienate loyal readers.

   The factory is axing its night shift to cut costs.

   Note

   The participle of the American spelling, identical on the page to the one formed from axe. Dropping the silent e before -ing makes the two verbs meet, so only the spelling of the base form tells them apart. Watch for a second reading. In dialectal and nonstandard speech, ax is also a form of ask, so axing can mean asking. Keep that use out of formal writing.

3. 3
   nounfigurativelycountable

   The process by which something, such as a job or program, is abruptly canceled or terminated.

   News of the project's axing spread quickly through the office.

   The network announced the axing of three daytime programs.

   Similarcancellation, termination, scrapping, dropping

   Oppositerenewal

4. 4
   nouncountable

   An assault on a person carried out with an axe.

   The trial centered on a fatal axing in the victim's home.

   He was charged after the axing left two people gravely wounded.

   Note

   Violence named by its weapon, and countable enough to take a plural. William Ian Miller's Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (2009) writes of the sagas' "axings in the back," meaning killings carried out through treachery. The phrase bends the familiar stab in the back toward the blade at hand. That makes the literal attack carry the figurative sense of betrayal as well.

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