bearding

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of beard.

   Bearding the committee at its own meeting took more nerve than she had expected.

   Thousands of bees were bearding across the front of the hive on the hottest afternoon of the summer.

   Note

   The -ing form is regular, with no doubled consonant, and it carries whichever meaning the verb has: a bold challenge in bearding the committee, a hanging cluster in bees bearding on the hive. After be it marks an action in progress; at the head of a sentence it names the act as a noun. The same spelling is also a television picture fault.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   An unwanted video artifact in which darker parts of the signal bleed horizontally into brighter parts.

   Heavy bearding smeared the dark edge of the anchor's suit into the bright studio wall behind him.

   The engineer traced the bearding to a faulty cable between the camera and the control room.

   Note

   Broadcast and video engineers treat it as a mass noun: a picture shows some bearding, or heavy bearding, never a bearding. Because the fault lives in the signal rather than in the screen, engineers look for its cause along the path the picture travels, in cables and equipment between camera and display.

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