dispatching

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of dispatch.

   The utility is dispatching extra crews to restore power after the storm.

   She wasted no time dispatching her opponent in straight sets.

   Note

   The -ing form almost always carries an object, and the object decides the meaning: dispatching orders or a reporter is sending, dispatching an opponent is beating them, and dispatching a wounded animal is killing it. After be it builds the progressive; as a gerund it keeps its object (dispatching a crew took minutes). Nothing is doubled or dropped before -ing.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of sending someone or something to a destination for a particular purpose.

   The dispatching of rescue teams began within minutes of the earthquake.

   A delay in dispatching left the patient waiting forty minutes for an ambulance.

   Similarsending, deployment

3. 3
   nouncolloquialuncountable

   A burial, chiefly in the joking phrase “hatching, matching and dispatching” for the church's rites of birth, marriage and death.

   After forty years in the parish, the old priest had seen more hatching, matching and dispatching than he could count.

   With a christening in May, a wedding in June and Grandpa's funeral in August, it was a summer of hatching, matching and dispatching.

   Note

   The meaning survives almost only inside the rhyme, and the rhyme is the joke: dispatching already means killing off quickly or sending on one's way, so a funeral becomes the parish seeing someone off. Use it lightly, for the church's round of christenings, weddings and funerals; on its own the word will be read as sending, not burial.

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