caking

Pluralcakings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of cake.

   Dried paint was caking around the rim of the can.

   Sweat and dust were caking on the workers' faces by noon.

   Note

   The -ing form works both ways the verb does. Used intransitively, a substance cakes on its own, as when blood dries or paint hardens at a rim. Used transitively, one thing cakes another: mud caking his boots, coating them in a crust. As a gerund it names the process itself (the caking of the paint). The hardened layer that results belongs to the noun for the deposit.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A layer or deposit formed from material that has hardened into a solid mass.

   Like the ring of mineral scale left inside a kettle after years of use.

   A caking of salt had built up along the edge of the evaporation pond.

   Workers scraped the caking of dried clay from the machinery.

   Similarcrust, layer, deposit, coating, encrustation

   Note

   Unlike the process, the deposit can be counted: a caking, two cakings. The plural is at home in engineering, where deposits build up inside equipment. Bernd Kleinjohann, Lisa Kleinjohann and Wayne Wolf's Distributed Embedded Systems (2008) describes tube walls made of slightly oscillating rubber "in order to avoid cakings." In the singular it usually takes of and the material: a caking of salt, a caking of clay.

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