communicating

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of communicate.

   The two teams are communicating through a shared dashboard.

   She spent the morning communicating updates to the board.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. As a participle it builds progressive tenses (they are communicating), and as a gerund it names the activity (communicating clearly takes practice). It carries every sense of communicate, including the church one, where it is intransitive: someone communicating at the Eucharist is receiving the bread and wine, not passing on news. Placed before a noun, it settles into the adjective for linked rooms.

2. 2
   adjective

   Allowing people to pass directly from one room into the adjoining one.

   The suite offers two communicating rooms joined by a private door.

   Their apartment had a communicating passage between the kitchen and the dining area.

   Similaradjoining

   Note

   A word for doors, passages and paired rooms, and it sits before the noun: a communicating door, communicating rooms. It does not grade, so one door cannot be more communicating than another. Trains suit it well. In Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) a passenger piles luggage against a communicating door, and G. Freeman Allen, writing in Train in 1960, has communicating doors between cars that open before you touch them.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2