blocking

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act by which something is blocked or held back; an obstruction.

   The blocking of the artery required emergency surgery.

   Protesters' blocking of the intersection brought traffic to a standstill.

   Similarobstruction, blockage

   Note

   As a mass noun it names the act itself, as in the blocking of major opposition sites. It also counts, naming separate episodes of obstruction, and its plural is blockings. Oliver Sacks, in Awakenings (1973), describes a patient whose voice alternated between "vocal blockings" and extreme vocal hurry. There the word means the moments when speech itself is held back.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of block.

   The fallen tree is blocking the only road into town.

   Heavy clouds were blocking the sun all afternoon.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. In "the tree is blocking the road" it is a participle after be. In "blocking the exit slows everyone down" it is a gerund that still takes an object, as a verb does. It carries every sense of block, from obstructing a road to impeding an opponent's play to staging a scene. That last use has settled into the stagecraft noun.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The precise movement and positioning of actors on stage to support a performance.

   The blocking for the duel had to be rehearsed many times for safety.

   During the first week, the cast worked out the blocking for each act.

   Similarstaging, choreography

   Note

   The name has a toy-box origin: actors' movements were first planned with miniature blocks standing in for the performers. The matching verb is block, so a director blocks a scene and the cast then learns its blocking. As a count noun it can attach to a single scene or a single act: the blocking for the duel, the blocking for each act.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Supporting blocks placed under a building or structure to hold it up temporarily.

   Crews installed blocking beneath the bridge while the supports were replaced.

   The mover slid blocking under each corner of the mobile home.

   Similarcribbing, shoring

5. 5
   noununcountable

   A keyboard feature that prevents the registering of multiple simultaneous keypresses that would otherwise cause ghosting.

   When several keys are pressed together, the keyboard's blocking drops the inputs that would otherwise ghost.

   Without proper blocking, holding three keys can produce a phantom fourth signal.

   Note

   A keyboard-matrix word that keeps company with ghosting. When pressed keys sit at three corners of a rectangle in the matrix, the fourth corner can register falsely. Blocking suppresses that phantom, but the suppressed press may be a real one, so builders treat it as a problem too. John St. Clair's Project Arcade (2011) advises laying out the matrix so that it "prevents both ghosting and blocking."

6. 6
   noununcountable

   A rectangular discontinuity that appears as an artifact when a discrete signal is divided into blocks processed individually.

   The codec introduced visible blocking along smooth color gradients in the compressed frame.

   Reducing the compression ratio lessened the blocking in the final image.

   Similarpixelation

   Note

   Compression produces its own checkerboard. When an image is cut into small blocks and each block is coded separately, the edges stop matching and a grid of squares shows through. The effect is worst at low bit-rates and most familiar from heavily compressed JPEG images. People say an image shows blocking, or that a codec introduced it, and they mean a visible defect.

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