caving

Pluralcavings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The recreational sport of exploring underground caves.

   Like mountaineering turned inward: exploring the hollow spaces inside the earth rather than the peaks above it.

   Caving requires ropes, helmets, and headlamps for navigating dark passages.

   She took up caving after a trip to the limestone caverns.

   Similarspelunking, potholing

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of cave.

   The old barn was caving in after years of neglect.

   Rescuers watched the hillside caving slowly into the valley.

   Note

   One form carries every sense of the verb cave, from the literal to the figurative. With in it usually means collapsing (the roof was caving in) or, figuratively, giving way under pressure. Miners also use it for breaking down a pillar that holds rock in place. Used as a gerund, it shades into the sport of cave exploring and the noun for a collapse.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   An act of collapsing or falling inward.

   Like the roof of a snow tunnel giving way and dropping inward.

   The caving of the riverbank washed away part of the road.

   Engineers feared a caving of the ceiling in the abandoned shaft.

   Similarcollapse, subsidence

   Note

   Here the noun counts collapses, so it takes a plural. Sandy Gow and Bonar Alexander Gow's Roughnecks, Rock Bits and Rigs (2005) writes of wells abandoned "because of repeated cavings." In that use, each fall of earth or rock is a separate event. The countable form suits talk of wells, shafts and banks. Keep it apart from the sport of cave exploring, which shares the spelling but has nothing to do with falling in.

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