dancing

Pluraldancings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The activity or pastime of taking part in a dance.

   An evening of dancing left the whole wedding party exhausted but happy.

   She credits dancing with keeping her fit well into her seventies.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of dance.

   Couples were dancing across the floor for most of the evening.

   He enjoys dancing more than any other pastime.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. With be it forms the progressive (were dancing all night), and as a gerund it fills a noun's slot while keeping a verb's habits. The gerund can take an object or an adverb, as in dancing the tango or dancing badly, because the verb is transitive as well as intransitive. The noun for the pastime takes adjectives instead: folk dancing, late-night dancing.

3. 3
   nounhistoricalcountable

   A public dance club of the kind found in France, where people gathered for social dancing.

   Soldiers on leave crowded into the dancing near the harbor.

   New dancings pervaded the length and breadth of Montmartre in order to suit the taste of foreign patrons.

   2001, William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars

   Similarclub, ballroom

   Note

   A historian's word for a place rather than an activity: the dance halls of interwar Paris. William A. Shack's Harlem in Montmartre (2001) describes new dancings spreading across Montmartre for foreign patrons. Because it names a venue, it takes an article and a plural, as in a dancing or the dancings. That is how it is told apart from the pastime itself, which usually stands alone.

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