clipping

Pluralclippings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A small piece removed from something by cutting or trimming.

   The gardener raked the hedge clippings into a tidy heap.

   A clipping of fingernail had lodged in the carpet fibers.

   Similarsnippet, offcut

   Note

   In the garden this sense is nearly always plural: grass clippings, hedge clippings, clippings left on the lawn or gathered for mulch. The singular turns up for small single bits, such as a clipping of hair. Offcut and snippet are close neighbors. Offcut suits wood or fabric, and snippet suits anything small. Keep it apart from the newspaper cutting, which is saved for what it says rather than swept up.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An article or item cut out from a newspaper or, less often, a magazine.

   The historian sorted through yellowed clippings from wartime newspapers.

   She framed the clipping announcing her grandfather's election.

   Similarcutting

   Note

   Journalism uses the word for the article itself, kept after it has been cut from the page. Clippings are gathered in scrapbooks or supplied by services that monitor coverage of a subject, and they age visibly: James Bishop Jr. writes in 2011 of a 90-year-old yellowed clipping. Cutting and press cutting name the same object, and the general cut-off piece is the wider sense this one narrows.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act by which something is cut or trimmed off.

   The clipping of coupons from the Sunday paper was her weekly ritual.

   Wool clipping on the farm begins in late spring.

   Similarcutting, trimming, shearing, snipping

4. 4
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of clip.

   He kept clipping coupons until the stack overflowed.

   They are clipping the sheep's wool this week.

   Note

   The -ing form carries both halves of clip. One family of meanings grips or fastens (clipping papers together). The other cuts or curtails (clipping a hedge, clipping a speech short). Only context tells them apart. As a gerund it sits close to the noun naming the act. The difference shows in the grammar: the verb takes a direct object (clipping coupons), while the noun takes of (the clipping of coupons).

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A shortened word formed by removing one or more syllables, often from the end of a longer word.

   Linguists count 'fridge' as a clipping of 'refrigerator'.

   English absorbs new clippings constantly, from 'app' to 'memo'.

   Similarabbreviation

   Note

   The product rather than the process, and countable. The usual frame is a clipping of, as in "ad" is a clipping of "advertisement". Most clippings keep the front of the word, so one that drops the beginning stands out. Peter T. Daniels calls Lia an unusual clipping before suspecting it is short for Julia. Short form is the plain-English equivalent.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   The cutting off of a signal at the points where it exceeds a set maximum level.

   The recording suffered from clipping because the input gain was set too high.

   Engineers lowered the gain to avoid clipping on the loudest passages.

   Note

   Audio and electronics engineers use this for a kind of distortion. When an amplifier or converter is driven past its maximum, the peaks of the waveform are flattened off. It usually comes up as a fault to be avoided, caused by setting the gain too high. The verb follows naturally: a signal or a recording is said to clip.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   A word-formation process that creates new words by shortening longer ones, often by removing final syllables.

   Clipping is one of the most productive ways English shortens words.

   Through clipping, 'laboratory' became the everyday 'lab'.

   Similarshortening, truncation

   Note

   Linguists treat this as a morphological process. A longer word loses syllables but keeps its meaning and word class, as when advertisement becomes ad. The cut usually falls at the end of the word. As the name of a process it is uncountable: English forms words by clipping. A single shortened word is the clipping itself, which takes a plural.

8. 8
   noununcountable

   The use of a mask to hide or cut off part of an object or image so only a chosen area shows.

   The designer applied clipping to reveal only the logo's outline.

   Without clipping, the graphic would spill past its frame.

   Similarmasking

   Note

   In graphics work, this restricts drawing to a defined region, a mask or a viewport. The parts of an object or image that fall outside that boundary are discarded rather than shown. Designers speak of applying clipping, treating it as an uncountable operation rather than a thing. It is the visual cousin of the signal-processing sense: in both, whatever crosses a limit is cut away.

9. 9
   nounCanadianuncountable

   In football, coming up behind an opponent and then falling, rolling, or throwing one's body onto the back of their legs.

   The defender was flagged for clipping during the kick return.

   Clipping from behind drew a heavy penalty in the second half.

   Note

   This is a rulebook term in both American and Canadian football. It names an illegal block to the back of an opponent's legs, penalized because of the danger to the knees. It appears almost entirely in officiating language: a player is flagged for clipping or called for clipping. Like other foul names, it takes no article.

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