commenting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of comment.

   Viewers were commenting in real time as the match unfolded.

   He spent the whole evening commenting on his friends' photos.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every use of the verb, and each use takes its own construction. Most often it is followed by on: commenting on a post or a proposal. Without on it reports words directly, as in commenting that the hour was late. Programmers use it for adding notes to source code, and commenting out a line means disabling it by turning it into a comment. An older transitive use, commenting a text, is obsolete.

   She was commenting out the debug lines before the release.

   He kept commenting that the room was cold.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of making a comment or remarks about something; commentary.

   The newspaper disabled commenting on its most divisive articles.

   Public commenting on the zoning proposal closed at midnight.

   Similarcommentary, feedback, discussion

   Note

   Even this activity noun can be counted. E. F. Benson's Our Family Affairs speaks of interpretations he "would never have made in any other commentings," treating each occasion of remarking as a separate act. Unlike the verb form, it takes adjectives and articles, as in public commenting. Commentary leans toward the remarks that are produced, while commenting keeps the sense of the doing.

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