containing

Pluralcontainings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of contain.

   Police seized a package containing illegal substances at the border.

   The folder containing the signed contract went missing overnight.

   Note

   It most often follows a noun as a shortened relative clause: a slow-release device containing angiogenic factors is a device that contains them. Because contain is transitive in all its living senses, the form takes a direct object. That includes the restraining meaning, as in containing the damage. Only the obsolete sense of living in continence ever stood without an object.

2. 2
   nounplural

   The things held or included within something; its contents.

   Any, – all words are thine, Isabel; words and worlds with all their containings, shall be slaves to thee, Isabel.

   1852, Herman Melville, Pierre

   Similarcontents

   Note

   A noun that lives only in the plural, built on the same verb as the participle. Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) uses it for everything that words and worlds hold: "words and worlds with all their containings." Everyday prose says contents instead. A singular containing will be read as the verb form rather than as this noun.

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