cloaking

Pluralcloakings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of cloak.

   Officials were accused of cloaking the deal in secrecy until after the vote.

   In the film, the starship escapes by cloaking itself seconds before the enemy fires.

   Note

   Cloak simply adds -ing, with no change to the stem. The participle often takes in for the cover being used, as in cloaking the deal in secrecy, and in science fiction it works with or without an object: a ship can be cloaking itself, or simply cloaking, as it slips out of sight.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of wrapping or covering someone or something with a cloak.

   His careful cloaking of each guest before they stepped into the snow charmed the whole party.

   The ceremony closed with the cloaking of the new knight in a crimson mantle.

   Note

   The plural can poke fun at fussy gallantry: in Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), a teasing list of compliments, bowings, cloakings, shawlings and handings makes polite attentions sound faintly comic, and worth a little suspicion. Hugh Latimer, writing in 1555, had already paired cloakings with dissemblings, and there the cover is moral rather than woolen, a hiding of the truth.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Fabric of the kind from which cloaks are made.

   A yard of good wool cloaking cost more than the buttons and lining together.

   The mill's catalog listed flannels, worsteds and heavy cloakings for the winter trade.

   Note

   This is a word of the textile trade: a 1908 issue of Fibre & Fabric lists cloakings beside cassimeres, mohair and raw wool. Like shirting and suiting, it is uncountable for the cloth itself (a yard of cloaking) and countable for the varieties a mill sells, which is why price lists and catalogs give it in the plural.

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