blanketing

Pluralblanketings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A covering layer of something that spreads over a surface the way a blanket does.

   A blanketing of fresh powder muffled every sound in the forest.

   The volcano left a fine blanketing of dust across nearby towns.

   Similarlayer, covering, coating, carpet, mantle

   Note

   The figurative layer typically comes with of and a noun, as in a blanketing of snow, or Saki's mushrooms lying cool "under their white blanketing of sauce." The plural suits drifts and folds of covering. Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) stretches it past anything physical to "the swaddlings and blanketings of the Cambridge night," where darkness itself is the layer that hides what lies beneath.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of blanket.

   Clouds were blanketing the entire valley as we drove down.

   Volunteers spent the night blanketing the shelter beds against the cold.

   Note

   The verb form carries every sense of blanket, so it reaches well beyond covering: sailors blanketing a rival boat, a strong radio signal blanketing a weaker one, canvassers blanketing a district to cover it thoroughly. As a gerund it shares its spelling with the nouns, and context decides which you have. The blanketing of the valley names an action, while a blanketing of snow names the covering layer itself.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Woolen or similar cloth used for making blankets.

   The factory wove heavy blanketing for the winter market.

   Tailors cut the warm blanketing into large rectangles.

   Note

   Here -ing turns blanket into the name of the stuff blankets are made from. It behaves like any fabric name, as a mass noun: a length of blanketing. It can still take a plural, as when E. O. Mousley's The Secrets of a Kuttite (1922) has rocks hung out "like blanketings in the morning sun." W. S. Gilbert's Iolanthe (1882) remembers its feel: blanketing that tickles and pricks.

4. 4
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A layer laid beneath the trackbed to keep clay subsoil and water from being pushed to the surface by the weight of trains.

   Engineers specified blanketing along the marshy section to protect the line.

   The old route failed because its blanketing had broken down over decades.

   Note

   A railway engineer's remedy for a soft, wet trackbed. Under the pounding of trains, clay subsoil and water work their way upward, and blanketing puts a barrier layer between them and the track. It is heavy work: a 1962 Modern Railways report describes digging out main lines to 4½ ft below rail level for 1⅜ miles, with polythene among the materials. Railway writers pair it with track: track blanketing.

5. 5
   nounslangcountable or uncountable

   A maneuver in which one vessel covers another's sails, robbing it of wind and leaving it becalmed.

   The crew won the leg through careful blanketing of the second-place yacht.

   Good blanketing near the mark left their rival drifting without wind.

   Note

   Yachting slang for an ambush made with sails. A boat gets to windward of a rival, onto its weather side, and its canvas steals the wind the other needs. The idiom is to give a rival a blanketing. In Edward Sullivan's Yachting (1894), one boat "gave her such a complete blanketing as left her almost in irons," stalled and unable to steer. The register belongs to sailors and suits race talk better than formal prose.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of tossing a person repeatedly into the air from a stretched blanket, whether in sport or as a punishment.

   The midshipmen gave the latecomer a thorough blanketing on deck.

   After the prank, the team threatened him with a blanketing in the locker room.

   Note

   Rough justice delivered with a blanket: the victim is flung upward again and again by the people holding it taut. Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1728) lists "blanketings and blows" among humiliations every street knows. Tobias Smollett's 1755 translation of Cervantes speaks of "that affair of the blanketing" as a single remembered event, which is why the noun can be counted. The matching verb, to blanket someone, lives on in the verb's -ing form.

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