calculating

1. 1
   adjective

   Coldly focused on one's own advantage, guided by careful reasoning rather than emotion.

   Like a chess master who treats each move as a step toward checkmate, never a friendly game.

   Behind his warm manner lay a calculating mind that weighed every friendship for its usefulness.

   The negotiator's calculating approach left no room for sentiment.

   Similarscheming, shrewd, cunning, manipulative, crafty

   Oppositeguileless, naive, ingenuous, artless

   Note

   Arithmetic turned into a judgment of character. The word is mostly said of people, though it stretches to what they do. "What sort of person does something so cold and calculating?" asks a speaker in Steven Morris's 2011 report on a Devon court case. Cold is its habitual partner, and the pairing is seldom a compliment. It implies that feeling was weighed and set aside.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of calculate.

   The engineer spent the morning calculating the load each beam could bear.

   Calculating compound interest by hand is tedious without a spreadsheet.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every use of calculate, including some the adjectives never reach. With be it builds the progressive (she was calculating the cost), and as a gerund it works as a noun (calculating by hand is slow). In US dialect speech it can mean planning or expecting, as in calculating to leave at dawn. A player can also be calculating several moves ahead without touching a piece.

3. 3
   adjective

   Possessing the ability to perform mathematical calculations.

   Like a pocket calculator, but built from gears and levers.

   The Difference Engine was a calculating apparatus designed to produce mathematical tables.

   Nineteenth-century inventors competed to build the most reliable calculating machine.

   Note

   A label for what a machine is built to do: a calculating device, a calculating machine. It sits before the noun and names a function, not a temperament. Unlike the cold, self-serving meaning, it does not grade, since one device is not more calculating than another in this sense. So whenever you meet more calculating or most calculating, the word is describing character.

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