casing

Pluralcasings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An outer cover or shell that encloses and protects something inside it.

   The engine's metal casing protects the moving parts from dirt and water.

   Workers pried open the steel casing around the cables.

   Similarhousing, shell, cover, sheath

   Note

   The general sense the specialized ones narrow from: anything that wraps something else, from the skin of a sausage to the streamlined shell that E. J. Tyler and J. Quanjer describe on Dutch steam locomotives in 1955, which made the engines run hot. E. R. Eddison uses it figuratively in The Worm Ouroboros (1922), likening a showily dressed man to a false jewel in a rich casing.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Decorative trim that frames the edges of a door or window.

   The carpenter installed fresh casing around every window in the room.

   Wide casing gave the doorway a finished, formal look.

   Similartrim, molding, architrave

   Note

   Finish carpentry has its own use for the word. Casing is the molding applied around a door or window opening to hide the seam between frame and wall, usually mitered at the corners and chosen to suit the room. Carpenters often treat it as a mass noun: they install casing, not casings. The frame it covers is a separate piece and is not part of the casing.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of case.

   The factory workers are casing fresh sausages on the line.

   Burglars were casing the building for weeks before the break-in.

   Note

   Several senses of the verb case stand behind this form: boxing goods for shipment, enclosing something in a case, and the informal sense of scouting a building before a robbery, as in burglars casing a house. As a gerund it can blur with the noun for a shell. The casing of the wires may mean the act of wrapping them or the wrapping itself.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   In drilling, the metal piping inserted into a borehole to line the well.

   Crews cemented the casing in place before drilling deeper.

   A crack in the casing let groundwater seep into the well.

   Note

   In drilling, casing is the steel pipe lowered into a borehole and cemented in place. It holds the walls up and keeps underground fluids from migrating between formations. Crews speak of cementing casing, usually without an article, much as carpenters do with the door-frame trim.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The arrangement of uppercase and lowercase letters across a phrase or several lines of text.

   The function normalizes the casing before comparing two strings.

   Inconsistent casing across the headings made the page look sloppy.

   Similarcapitalization

   Note

   A programmer's word for the overall pattern of capitals and small letters in a string, as opposed to the case of a single letter. Software preserves, compares or normalizes casing, for example by converting text to all lowercase or to title case. The word takes no plural, so you write the casing of two headings, not their casings.

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