boring

Pluralborings (some meanings)

1. 1
   adjective

   Uninteresting in a way that leaves you tired and wanting it to end.

   The lecture was boring, and half the audience was checking their phones.

   She dreaded another boring committee meeting full of budget spreadsheets.

   Similardull, tedious, uninteresting, monotonous, tiresome

   Oppositeinteresting, exciting, fascinating, gripping

   Note

   The everyday adjective, and the one that invites comparison. More boring and most boring are standard, but boringer and boringest turn up in speech. Peter De Vries's Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983) has a character quip that "nothing's boringer than that." In Nancy Rue's Sophie's Secret (2004), a whining Kitty insists hers was "even boringer." Keep the -er forms for playful or childlike effect.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of bore.

   Engineers were boring through bedrock to lay the new water line.

   He kept boring the guests with stories about his stamp collection.

   Note

   One -ing form serves two strands of the verb: drilling and wearying someone. Both build progressives with be (engineers were boring through bedrock; he was boring the guests), and both make gerunds. The drilling verb also runs intransitively with through or into. When no object follows, "the talk was boring" is usually the adjective "dull", not the verb.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The process of making holes with a rotating tool, and also this work as a specialized skill in manufacturing.

   Precision boring accounts for most of the shop's machining work.

   After the castings cool, they move to a separate station for boring.

   Similardrilling

   Note

   The core sense, and the root of everything else on this page: Middle English boryng meant "making a hole", built from bore plus -ing. In the workshop it keeps company with other machining nouns, as in turning and boring. It also compounds freely: fine boring is done with a boring head on a boring mill. Even the tedious meaning traces back to this hole-making.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A pit or hole that has been bored.

   The survey crew sank a boring at each corner of the building site.

   Old mine borings dot the hillside above the town.

   Similarborehole, hole, shaft

   Note

   Unlike the process, this is a countable noun, and it takes a plural freely. J. Patrick Powers's Construction dewatering (1992) observes that urban sites often hold a great many borings left from earlier construction work. Here a boring is a hole sunk into the ground. The plural is shared with the "drilled-out fragments" meaning, so context decides whether borings are holes or debris.

5. 5
   adjective

   Used for, designed to be used for, or capable of drilling holes.

   A massive boring machine carved the subway tunnel beneath the harbor.

   The shop keeps a rack of boring bars in graduated sizes.

   Note

   A classifying adjective that sits before its noun, as in boring equipment and boring snails. It sorts things by what they do, so it does not take very or more. Boring snails are snails that drill holes, not dull ones. The phrase looks like a joke only to a reader expecting the "tedious" meaning.

6. 6
   adjectiveManglish

   Feeling bored, restless, and mildly annoyed through having nothing to do.

   My phone died at the bus stop, so I was so boring, just sitting there watching cars.

   Boss on leave, no work coming in, the whole office boring lah.

   Similarbored

   Oppositeinterested

   Note

   Malaysian English lets the adjective face the other way: boring describes the person who feels the boredom. So I very boring means "I'm bored," often with no linking verb. Elsewhere the same words sound like a confession of being dull, so bored is the safer choice in international writing. The "dull, tiresome" meaning is the one every variety shares.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   A fragment of material thrown off by a drill or boring tool as it cuts a hole.

   Brass borings glittered in the tray beneath the lathe.

   A single boring lodged in the gears and jammed the whole mechanism.

   Similarchip

   Note

   It is usually met in the plural, the way chips are. Borings collect in a heap beneath the drill rather than arriving one at a time, and chip is the nearest everyday synonym. Since borings can also be holes in the ground, naming the material, as in brass borings or steel borings, makes clear that the word means debris.

8. 8
   adjective

   Penetrating or piercing, as if able to pass through whatever it meets.

   The old sergeant studied each recruit with keen, boring eyes that missed nothing.

   A boring north wind cut through every layer he wore.

   Similarpiercing, penetrating, biting

   Note

   The drilling image carried over to a look that seems to go straight through you. Arthur Upfield's The Lake Frome Monster (1963) gives a man remarkably blue eyes with "the trick of boring concentration," a stare that drills. Eyes and gaze are its natural partners. Next to a word like concentration the sense is clear, but on its own "a boring look" risks being read as dull.

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