digging

SayDIG-ingUS/ˈdɪɡɪŋ/UK/ˈdɪɡɪŋ(ɡ)/

Noun pluraldiggings (some meanings)

5 meanings of digging

1
verb
Present participle of dig.
Volunteers were digging trenches to redirect the floodwater.
She spent the whole weekend digging in her vegetable garden.
Note
Every sense of dig passes through this form, from the spade to the archive. As a verb it keeps its particles: digging up an old coin, digging out the facts, where up and out turn physical work into research. That is also how to tell it from the noun for the activity. The verb takes an object directly (digging trenches), while the noun needs of (the digging of trenches).
Reporters spent months digging up records the council had tried to bury.
She kept digging out details nobody else had noticed.
2
noununcountable
The act of breaking up and moving earth, soil, or other material, as carried out by a person or machine.
The digging continued well into the night as crews searched for survivors.
Years of careless digging had disturbed the ancient burial site.
Similarexcavation, shoveling, tunneling
3
nounusually plural
A site where ore is dug from the ground, especially the localities in California, Australia, and elsewhere where gold was obtained.
Prospectors flocked to every fresh digging along the creek.
The richest digging in the territory was worked out within a year.
Similarmine, claim

Less common meanings

4
noundatedplural
Accommodation or lodgings; the room or place a person rents to live in.
After the war he kept the same shabby digging he had rented as a young clerk.
Touring actors shared cheap digs from one town to the next.
Similarlodgings, room, quarters, accommodation
Note
An old-fashioned, conversational word for the place where someone lodges. The clipped digs is the form most readers will recognize today. Digging in the singular now sounds like period dialogue: it suits a novel set generations ago but would read oddly in a modern email. If you want the meaning without the period flavor, digs is the safer choice.
5
nounarchaiccountable or uncountableplural
A region or locality; the general area or part of the country a person is in.
There wasn't a finer horse in the whole digging.
Folks in these diggings looked after their own.
Note
Frontier talk rather than polite prose: a colloquial word for one's home ground, now archaic and usually plural. T. B. Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas" (1843) gives it to a backwoods storyteller as "diggins," spelled the way it was spoken and marked as the speaker's own idiom. Keep it distinct from the gold-field sense: these diggings means the neighborhood, not a mine.

digging is a form of dig

dig, verb: To remove earth, sand, rock, or similar material, especially downward with a tool, in order to make a hole. Full entry

Forms: digdigs he/she/itdigging -ing formdug past tense, past participle
Spelling: dig → digging: double the g, add -ing

Practice

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