boating

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The recreational activity of traveling on a body of water in a boat.

   They spent the weekend boating along the coast.

   Boating requires checking the weather before you head out.

   Note

   The pastime is usually uncountable, but the noun can also be counted, each boating one trip out on the water. Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) lines up "ridings, and shootings, and boatings," and Pennsylvania Angler in 1953 recalls "tales… of boatings and fishing" on an old canal. The plural tends to appear alongside other -ing pastimes rather than on its own.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of boat.

   The family is boating across the bay today.

   She enjoys boating whenever the weather is calm.

   Note

   The verb form carries every sense of boat, including the transitive ones the noun lacks: someone can be boating supplies across a lake or boating passengers to an island. The direct object is the quickest test. Boating the children ashore is the verb, while a day of boating is the pastime. An obsolete slang use meant shipping a convict off to a penal colony.

   They spent the morning boating supplies across the lake.

   The ferryman was boating passengers to the island.

3. 3
   nounhistoricaluncountable

   In ancient Persia, a method of executing capital offenders by laying them on their back in a covered boat and leaving them to perish.

   The court condemned the assassin to boating, a sentence reserved for the worst crimes.

   Boating left its victims exposed to the sun until they perished.

   Note

   A historian's word, met in accounts of Persian justice rather than in everyday speech. Because it shares its spelling with the pastime on the water, the surrounding words have to signal it: a court, a sentence, a condemned offender. When writing about the practice, explain it on first use, since a reader who sees the word alone will assume the leisure meaning.

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