capping

Pluralcappings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of cap.

   Workers are capping the chimney to stop birds from nesting inside.

   Capping each pen after use keeps the ink from drying out.

   Note

   The doubled p is the giveaway. A short verb ending in a single vowel and a single consonant doubles that consonant before -ing, so cap becomes capping. The form carries every meaning of the verb, from sealing a bottle to setting a limit (capping rents) or ending something in style (capping a fine evening). As a gerund it can head a sentence: capping costs proved unpopular.

2. 2
   nounslanguncountable

   The act of lying or exaggerating.

   Like a fisherman who swears the one that got away was three feet long.

   His teammates called out the capping as soon as he claimed he dunked over three defenders.

   She swore there was no capping behind her account of the night.

   Similarlying, exaggeration, fibbing

   Note

   A slang word from African-American Vernacular English, where to cap is to lie or to boast past the truth. Its best-known offspring is the disclaimer no cap, which means "I'm not exaggerating." The noun usually serves to call out a tall claim. It belongs to casual talk among friends and online, and in formal settings it can sound forced.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The taking off of one's hat as a gesture of respect toward someone.

   The old gentleman's capping to passing ladies was a habit from another era.

   A brief capping acknowledged the funeral procession as it moved down the street.

   Note

   Hat courtesy could be counted gesture by gesture. In John Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's Essayes, the essayist calls himself "very prodigall of cappings" and returns as many as he receives from men of any rank. The plural is the point: each doffing of the hat is one capping, given and returned like a greeting.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The sealing of an oil well by covering over its borehole.

   The capping of the abandoned well prevented further contamination of the groundwater.

   Engineers planned the capping carefully to withstand the pressure from below.

   Similarsealing

5. 5
   noununcountable

   In finance, the sale of a security or similar holding shortly before an expiration date.

   Investigators suspected capping in the heavy selling that hit the shares minutes before expiry.

   The exchange flagged the capping as a possible attempt to influence the settlement value.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   The saving of a television broadcast as a recording on one's own computer.

   His capping of the broadcast preserved an episode the network later deleted.

   Capping the overnight news let her review the segment frame by frame.

   Similarrecording

7. 7
   nouncountable or uncountable

   In mining geology, the leached top portion of a rock body that still holds sulfide minerals scattered through it.

   Drilling through the capping revealed the richer sulfide zone beneath it.

   The survey mapped the capping across the ridge to outline the buried ore body.

   Note

   Geologists use the word for the weathered lid over a mineral deposit. Water has leached the upper rock, but scattered sulfide minerals remain, and they hint at what lies deeper. The image comes from the verb's sense of lying on top of something. In practice the capping is something mapped at the surface or drilled through to reach the ore below.

8. 8
   noununcountable

   In geometry, turning a polyhedron into a stellated one by building a pyramid on each of its faces.

   The capping of the dodecahedron yielded a striking stellated form.

   Through capping, a plain octahedron grows a sharp point on every face.

   Note

   Geometers treat it as a building operation. Every face of a solid gets a pyramid of its own, so a plain polyhedron turns spiky and star-like. The word names the procedure, and the result is called a stellated polyhedron. It works as a count noun for a single instance, as in a capping of the octahedron, and as a mass noun for the technique in general.

9. 9
   noununcountable

   The method of capitalizing every other word in social media titles and tags to make them more readable than unbroken case.

   A bit of capping turned the cramped hashtag into something readers could actually parse.

   Capping helps a multi-word tag stand out without the gaps that spaces would add.

   Note

   Hashtags cannot contain spaces, so this practice uses letter case to show where one word ends and the next begins. Whole words alternate between full capitals and lowercase, as in #CAPPINGimprovesREADABILITY. That sets it apart from giving each word a single initial capital. It suits long tags, where an unbroken run of one case is hard to read.

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