casting

Pluralcastings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act or process of selecting actors, singers, dancers, or models for roles or parts.

   The director was praised for the casting of the lead role.

   Casting for the musical drew hundreds of hopeful performers.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A manufacturing process that forms objects by pouring molten material into a mold and letting it solidify.

   Casting allows manufacturers to produce complex shapes at low cost.

   The sculptor learned bronze casting at art school.

   Similarmolding

   Note

   Foundry work uses one word for the process and for what it produces, and context keeps the two apart. Molten metal is the classic material, but plaster, resin and ceramic slip are worked the same way: poured into a cavity, they keep its shape once set. As a process the noun is usually uncountable (bronze casting, resin casting). The plural, castings, almost always means the molded object instead.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   An object formed by pouring molten material into a mold and letting it harden.

   The museum displayed a delicate silver casting from the eighteenth century.

   Several castings cracked during cooling and had to be remade.

   Note

   A foundry's output, counted piece by piece. Workshop speech can still run the object and the craft together. The 1944 memoir Some Memories of Crewe Works calls casting steel the most difficult of the foundry arts, then praises the "very good class of casting" that Crewe turned out. There the word stands for the work as a body rather than for a single piece.

4. 4
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of cast.

   The foundry is casting metal parts around the clock.

   She kept casting glances toward the door all evening.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. In a progressive it is a participle (the foundry is casting parts); as a verbal noun it names the action itself (casting a line takes patience). It carries the verb's whole range, from throwing a fishing line to an animal shedding its coat. Because cast keeps one form for present, past and past participle, casting and casts are the only forms of the verb that look different.

5. 5
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of converting a value from one data type to another.

   Casting a float to an integer drops the fractional part.

   Implicit casting can introduce subtle bugs in large codebases.

   Similarconversion, coercion

   Note

   Programmers cast a value to a type, as in casting a float to an integer. The conversion may be written out explicitly, or it may happen implicitly when the language does it unasked. What results depends on the language and the types involved. Some casts reinterpret the same underlying bits, while others build a new representation of the value. That difference is where the subtle bugs tend to hide.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of hounds spreading out to search for a scent.

   The huntsman allowed the pack a few minutes of casting before the chase resumed.

   Skilled casting let the hounds recover the lost line quickly.

   Note

   Hunting language for what a pack does when the scent fails. The hounds fan out, on their own or at the huntsman's direction, to pick up the line again. It belongs to the rhythm of the chase, set against full cry. In H.L. Brækstad's 1886 translation of Asbjørnsen's Folk and Fairy Tales, there is "no stopping or casting" before the hounds are soon in full cry.

7. 7
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The regurgitation by a hawk of fur, feathers, and other indigestible material to clean and empty its crop.

   Falconers examine the casting to judge a hawk's condition.

   The bird produced a firm casting the morning after its meal.

   Similarpellet

   Note

   A falconer's word for what the bird casts up: the pellet of fur and feathers it cannot digest. Keeping an eye on it was part of a hawk's daily care. In Walter Scott's The Abbot (1820), Roland scolds a servant for feeding a young hawk unwashed meat and for neglecting "its castings also for these two days". The passage shows the plural used of the routine.

8. 8
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The excreta of an earthworm or similar creature, deposited as it burrows through the soil.

   Worm casting is prized by organic gardeners as a soil conditioner.

   The bed was rich with earthworm casting after a season of composting.

   Note

   This is the other end of the same idea as a hawk's pellet: something an animal casts out, this time left in the soil as the worm feeds. Organic gardeners prize it as a natural amendment that improves soil structure and fertility. The word is usually paired with the creature, as in worm casting or earthworm casting.

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