blacking

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A polish used on leather shoes to give them a black, shiny finish.

   The soldier applied a thin coat of blacking to his parade boots.

   A tin of blacking sat on the shelf beside the brushes.

   Similarpolish

2. 2
   noununcountable

   A substance made with lampblack that is applied to give surfaces a glossy black finish.

   The foundry worker brushed blacking over the cast-iron grate.

   A coat of blacking restored the fireplace surround to a glossy black.

   Note

   The general-purpose coating that the shoe-polish meaning narrows to a single use. Its color comes from lampblack, a fine soot. Its traditional work was on iron: stoves, grates and fireplace surrounds brushed back to a gloss. It is usually a mass noun, so you speak of a coat of blacking or a tin of blacking rather than of a blacking.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of black.

   The recruits were blacking their boots when the sergeant arrived.

   Blacking the grate was a daily chore in the old house.

   Note

   The verb form shares its spelling with the noun, and the grammar tells them apart. Every verb meaning of black takes an object, so the participle is followed by what is being blackened, polished or boycotted: blacking the grate, blacking a shipment. The noun takes articles and a plural instead, as in a tin of blacking or several blackings.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A boycott of goods or work, usually carried out as part of an industrial dispute.

   The dockers imposed a blacking on cargo bound for the strikebound plant.

   Management backed down only after the blacking spread to other depots.

   Similarboycott, ban, embargo

   Note

   A word from British trade-union usage, where workers refuse to handle, produce or move the goods or work of an employer in dispute. Unlike the mass-noun coatings, it counts easily. Graham Stewart's Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (2013) has the unions fighting Murdoch with "picket lines, blackings and boycotts." The matching verb is plain black: a union blacks a cargo or a depot.

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