coaching

Pluralcoachings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Personal instruction or training given to help someone develop a skill or improve performance.

   Intensive coaching helped the candidate pass the bar exam on her first try.

   The company offers leadership coaching to all its managers.

   Similartraining, instruction, tutoring, tuition, mentoring

   Note

   Usually a mass noun, as in leadership coaching or intensive coaching. Workplace and legal language also counts it. In the Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board (2009), the question is whether coachings were disciplinary. In that use each coaching is a discrete corrective session with an employee, and the plural is natural there in a way it would not be in a sports or exam context.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of coach.

   The veteran player is coaching a youth squad in his retirement.

   Volunteers are coaching local kids in reading after school.

   Note

   Two families of meaning share this form. Most often it belongs to the training verb, which can be transitive (coaching a squad) or intransitive (she is coaching this season), and it can also mean studying under a tutor. It can also mean traveling by coach, sometimes in the phrase coach it, or carrying someone in one. As a gerund it slides easily into the noun for instruction.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountablebefore a noun

   The subject or activity relating to horse-drawn stagecoaches and, by extension, railway carriages.

   The romance of coaching survives in paintings of red mail coaches racing through the night.

   Enthusiasts study the history of coaching, from turnpike roads to the first railway carriages.

   Note

   Used before another noun, it labels things belonging to the world of passenger coaches. The older, road meaning survives in phrases like a coaching stop, which Paul Stephen uses in Rail (2020) for a town on the old London–Holyhead mail route. Railway staff carried the word over to carriages. Modern Railways in 1962 contrasts coaching trains, which carried parcels, with freight.

4. 4
   nounhistoricaluncountable

   The operation of horse-drawn coaches as a transport business, carrying passengers and mail for payment.

   Coaching flourished along the great turnpike roads, with inns providing fresh horses at every stage.

   The arrival of the railway brought an end to coaching as a profitable trade.

   Note

   A word for a vanished trade, so it belongs in historical writing: coaching was, not coaching is. It takes no plural and usually no article, as in the coaching business or the decline of coaching. It shares its spelling exactly with the instruction sense, so let the surrounding talk of roads, inns and horses make clear which one you mean.

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