dogging

Pluraldoggings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of dog.

   A string of injuries kept dogging the team throughout the season.

   Rumors of corruption were dogging the mayor's campaign.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every sense of the verb, not just the figurative trouble of rumors and injuries. Dogging a hatch means fastening it. An employee who is dogging is working at the slowest pace that goes unpunished, and in slang, dogging someone means criticizing them. With an object it works as a participle (dogging the mayor). Used as a noun it becomes a gerund and overlaps with the hounding noun.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of persistently following, troubling, or harassing someone.

   Like a shadow that refuses to leave, trailing every move you make.

   The relentless dogging of the candidate by reporters left her exhausted.

   Years of dogging by creditors finally drove him into bankruptcy.

   Similarhounding, harassment, pursuit

   Note

   A noun that can count its episodes. Craik and MacFarlane's The Pictorial History of England (1844) speaks of being "free from the doggings of the common informer," each one a separate act of hounding. As a mass noun it names the whole pattern of pursuit. In the plural it names the individual incidents, and the plural is where older prose most often shows it.

3. 3
   nounUKuncountable

   Sex carried out in public places, especially parks, where the participants knowingly run the risk of being seen by others.

   Police stepped up patrols after reports of dogging at the car park near the woods.

   The tabloids ran a story about dogging hotspots across the county.

   Note

   Here the word belongs to British usage, where the subject is sexual and the tone is often wry. Fascinating Aida made it the title of a 2011 comic song. Alan Moore's Jerusalem (2016) reaches for the stock phrase "dogging hotspot" to describe a bleak stretch of tarmac, and hotspot is the collocation to expect. It is a mass noun with no plural, unlike the hounding sense.

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