bracketing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of enclosing text or other content within a pair of brackets.

   Consistent bracketing of editorial insertions helps readers tell them from the original text.

   She used bracketing to mark the words she planned to remove later.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of bracket.

   The copy editor is bracketing each of his own insertions for clarity.

   Bracketing the disputed passages let the committee review them separately.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every meaning of the verb, not only the typographic one. Bracketing a shelf supports it, bracketing two writers together puts them in one category, and bracketing a question sets it aside for now. The same spelling is also a countable noun with the plural bracketings, as in the act of enclosing text. A determiner or a plural ending signals the noun.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A series or group of brackets considered together, especially as decorative or supporting elements on a building.

   The Victorian house featured ornate bracketing beneath its deep eaves.

   Restorers carefully repaired the decorative bracketing that ran along the cornice.

   Note

   An architect's collective noun, it treats the brackets of a building as one feature instead of counting them one by one. These brackets are projecting supports, not punctuation. The word usually behaves like a mass noun: ornate bracketing, the bracketing along the cornice. To pick out a single support, go back to bracket itself.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A method of showing the internal structure of a string of elements by enclosing its parts in brackets, much as done in mathematics and symbolic logic.

   Linguists rely on bracketing to reveal how words combine into larger units.

   Her analysis used bracketing to separate the noun phrase from the verb phrase.

   Note

   Linguists use it to show which words group together before they join larger units. Brackets nest inside one another, so a single string can carry several layers of structure. Bracketing the same words two ways can also reveal an ambiguity, as in old men and women. Unlike the plain act of enclosing text, nothing is set off or inserted here; the brackets themselves are the analysis.

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