cabling

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A group of cables taken together, such as the wiring run throughout a building, machine, or system.

   Inspectors found that the cabling behind the wall had begun to fray.

   Modern data centers rely on miles of fiber-optic cabling.

   Similarwiring

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of cable.

   Workers are cabling the bridge to support the new deck.

   The technicians finished cabling the studio before noon.

   Note

   The -ing form of a verb with two lives. One is practical, covering wiring, fastening and bundling wires. The other is telegraphy, as in cabling the news home. As a gerund it can look exactly like the noun for the cables themselves: cabling a building is the work, while the cabling in a building is the result. Most uses take an object; only communicating by cable stands alone.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The decoration of a column's or pilaster's fluted shaft with reeds or rounded moldings that appear to lie in the hollows of the fluting.

   The pilaster's cabling filled the lower third of each flute.

   Baroque architects often used cabling to enrich plain fluted columns.

   Note

   Architects use it for flutes that are partly filled rather than left hollow. Convex reeds sit in the lower portion of each channel, where they also protect the fragile arrises near the base. It works as a mass noun for the feature (a column with cabling) and as a count noun for individual instances (the cablings of a pilaster). In a building context, keep it distinct from a bundle of cables, which shares the spelling.

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