batting

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The action of using a bat to strike a ball, especially in a sport such as cricket or baseball.

   Good batting requires quick reflexes and steady timing.

   The side's batting collapsed in the final innings.

   Similarhitting

   Note

   Cricket and baseball share this word, and in both it stretches from technique to team. Good batting is a skill a player has. A side's batting is its hitters taken together, which is how a batting can collapse. Read the subject to tell which is meant: a person's batting is their craft, and a team's batting is its lineup.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act performed by a person who is taking a turn to hit with a bat.

   His steady batting kept the team in the game until the last over.

   She enjoyed her batting and scored freely before being caught.

   Note

   Not only the player at the crease or plate bats. Someone fluttering their eyelashes is batting too, and the battings of her eyelashes counts each flutter as a separate act. The countable plural suits these small, repeated movements. The skill of hitting a ball belongs to the sporting sense.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of bat.

   The opener is batting cautiously against the new ball.

   Batting on a wet pitch slowed their scoring considerably.

   Note

   The -ing form serves every sense of the verb bat, not only the sporting ones. It covers batting a ball, batting at something as if with a bat, and, in dialect, batting the eyes in a wink or flutter. With be it forms the progressive (is batting cautiously). Without be it works as a verbal noun, and there it borders closely on the noun for using a bat.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Soft filling for quilts, mattresses, and similar items, made from cotton, wool, silk, or synthetic fibers.

   Quilters often choose wool batting for its warmth and light weight.

   He pulled the worn batting out of the cushion and replaced it.

   Similarwadding, padding, stuffing, filling

   Note

   Here the -ing names a material or collection, as in bedding, rather than an action. The word comes from bat or batt plus that suffix. That is why quilters speak of wool, cotton or synthetic batting as a stuff, and of battings as kinds of it. The sports word for the action of using a bat only shares the spelling. It comes from the action -ing, and the two are separate words.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   Cotton specially prepared for use in surgery and wound care.

   The surgeon packed the incision with sterile batting.

   Field hospitals once stocked rolls of batting to staunch bleeding.

   Similarwadding

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