burying

Pluralburyings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of bury.

   The crew was burying the cables beneath the road.

   Burying his feelings only made the situation worse.

   Note

   One spelling does two verbal jobs. As a participle it builds the progressive (the crew was burying the cables), and as a gerund it names the action while still taking an object (burying his feelings). It carries every use of bury: the literal spade-work, a voice buried under louder sounds, a person buried in work, and the humorous sense of burying one's rivals by outliving them.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The placing of a dead body into the ground; a burial.

   The burying of the war dead continued for several days after the battle.

   A hasty burying by the roadside was all the travelers could manage.

   Similarburial, interment

   Oppositeexhumation, disinterment

   Note

   Here bury plus -ing has settled into a full noun. Unlike the verbal gerund, it takes the and of rather than a direct object, as in the burying of the dead. It can also go plural: John Limon's Stand-up Comedy in Theory (2000) lists buryings alongside cuttings and excretings, among the things a body undergoes.

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