coping

Pluralcopings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The process of managing difficult circumstances, making an effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems, and working to reduce or tolerate stress and conflict.

   Healthy coping involves both solving the problem and managing the emotions it stirs up.

   Researchers tracked coping among caregivers living under chronic stress.

   Similaradaptation, adjustment

   Note

   Psychology turned an everyday participle into a term of art. As a noun it usually stands alone or before another noun: coping strategies, healthy coping, coping among caregivers. Researchers commonly divide it into problem-focused effort, aimed at the stressor, and emotion-focused effort, aimed at the distress the stressor causes. In ordinary speech, the verb form almost always takes with: coping with grief.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of cope.

   The team is coping with deep budget cuts this year.

   Many families are coping with sharply rising costs.

   Note

   In everyday use it belongs to the intransitive cope, which takes its object through with: coping with cuts, coping with rising costs. The same spelling also serves the trade verbs. A joiner is coping a mitred joint, a mason is coping a wall, and a falconer is coping a hawk. In those uses the participle sits very close to the wall-top noun and the falconer's noun.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The top course of a wall, especially a sloped layer of brick or stone designed to throw off rainwater.

   The masons finished the boundary wall with a smooth stone coping.

   Rainwater drained cleanly off the sloping coping rather than down the wall face.

   Similarcapping, capstone

   Note

   A builder's word that keeps the old sense of cope, 'to cover', from the cloak-like vestment that covers its wearer. The coping shelters the wall beneath it, and it also makes a ledge. Louis Joseph Vance lines flower-pots along the copings of a roof-garden in 1914, and in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922) a man stands at the coping to look out over the town.

4. 4
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The clipping or trimming of a bird's beak or talons, especially in falconry, to keep them at their proper length.

   The falconer performed a careful coping on the eagle's overgrown talons.

   Coping is part of the routine care given to captive birds of prey.

   Similartrimming, clipping

   Note

   A falconer's word for routine care. A captive hawk does not wear down its beak and talons the way a wild bird does, so they are trimmed back to keep its grip and feeding in shape. The verb is the same word: the falconer copes the bird. Despite the shared spelling, it has nothing to do with handling stress, and only context tells a falconry manual from a psychology paper.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4