divining

Pluraldivinings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of divine.

   The detectives were divining the suspect's motives from a handful of scattered clues.

   Divining the outcome of the election proved impossible for the pollsters.

   Note

   The verb form shares its spelling with the noun for the act and the describing adjective, and what follows it tells them apart. A direct object marks the verb (divining the outcome), since foretelling, guessing and searching all take one. Of marks the noun (the divining of secrets). In divining rod, the -ing names what the rod is for.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of discovering or guessing something hidden, whether through insight, prophecy, or searching the ground for water and minerals.

   The old dowser's divining for water saved the parched village that summer.

   Her uncanny divining of people's secrets unsettled the whole household.

   Similardivination, dowsing

   Note

   The plural is where this noun shows its quieter side. As a mass noun it names the practice itself, the seer's or the dowser's craft. In the plural it turns inward and means half-formed intimations. Martha Griffith Browne, in her Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857), writes of "the faint divinings of the future." Faint is a natural partner, because divinings are sensed rather than seen.

3. 3
   adjective

   Foretelling the future, perceiving hidden things by insight, or searching out underground water or minerals.

   The court kept a divining priest who read the king's fortune in the flight of birds.

   Her divining glance settled at once on the one guest who was lying.

   Similarprophetic, perceptive, penetrating, discerning

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