bunching

Pluralbunchings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of bunch.

   Cars were bunching at the toll booth as the lanes merged.

   She spent the morning bunching herbs for the market stall.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs, and the verb behind it works both ways. Transitively you bunch something, such as herbs or fabric drawn into folds. Intransitively things bunch on their own, as cars do at a toll booth, or as something swells and protrudes. As a gerund it takes a direct object (bunching herbs). Once it takes "of" or the plural bunchings, it has become the noun for clustering.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A grouping of items arranged closely together to form a cluster.

   A tidy bunching of dried lavender hung from the rafters.

   The shop displayed each bunching of carrots with the leaves still attached.

   Similarbundle, cluster

   Note

   The countable noun pluralizes freely and can describe dress as well as produce. Isabella Bird's Six Months in the Sandwich Islands scorns the "humpings and bunchings" of ultra-fashionable bad taste, meaning fabric gathered into lumps and folds. Set beside a tidy bunching of lavender, her usage shows that the arrangement need not be deliberate or neat. It can just as well be an awkward pile-up of material.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The fact of things occurring grouped closely together rather than evenly distributed.

   Traffic bunching near the exit slowed the whole highway.

   Officials noticed sudden bunching among the front-runners during the race.

   Similarclustering, crowding, congestion, clumping

   Note

   Uneven spacing is the point here, the opposite of a steady interval. London Transport, advertising in the Railway Magazine in 1949, used it for the familiar puzzle of three buses on one route arriving at a stop together. The word is uncountable when it names the tendency ("the explanation of bunching") and countable for a single instance. It is usually set against the gap or interval that ought to separate things.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The illegal supplying of laboratory animals that are in fact stolen pets or unlawfully trapped strays.

   Stricter licensing laws were introduced to stamp out bunching in the 1960s.

   Investigators linked the dealer's missing-pet reports to a wider bunching scheme.

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