carpeting

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Floor covering of carpet, or a piece of it, considered especially when being laid down or pulled up.

   The crew tore out the stained carpeting and replaced it the same day.

   Fresh carpeting ran from the front hall to the top of the stairs.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Cloth or other material used in making carpets.

   The factory produces miles of thick carpeting each year.

   Weavers selected a coarse carpeting that would hold up under heavy traffic.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of carpet.

   The crew is carpeting the office floor before the new tenants arrive.

   She kept carpeting room after room until the whole house was done.

   Note

   One spelling, two grammatical jobs. As a participle it builds progressive tenses (the crew is carpeting the hall); as a gerund it fills a noun slot (she considered carpeting her bedroom). It follows every sense of the verb, from laying carpet to blanketing a surface. In UK use the verb also means to reprimand, which is the verb behind the noun for a telling-off.

4. 4
   nouncolloquialuncountable

   A severe reprimand or telling-off.

   She received a thorough carpeting from the director over the leaked figures.

   After the sloppy report, the junior analyst was in for a carpeting.

   Similardressing-down, telling-off, reprimand, rebuke, scolding

   Oppositepraise

   Note

   An informal word that comes in a stock frame: someone gets a carpeting from a boss, or is in for one. Like other mass nouns it rarely takes a plural, yet in this phrase it happily takes the article a, much as a scolding or a dressing-down does. The person delivering it follows from, and the one receiving it is the subject of get or receive.

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