editing

Pluraleditings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An act or instance of changing, correcting, or improving a piece of work such as text, film, or audio.

   The manuscript received a thorough editing before it went to print.

   Each editing of the documentary tightened the pacing a little more.

   Similarrevision, rewrite, polish

   Note

   Here each pass at a piece of work counts as a separate event, so the word takes a plural. Betty R. Pritchett's The Indian Summer of Mary Margaret Masters (2012) credits a helper with "three complete editings" of a manuscript, one round after another. On the film side, montage sits close by as a synonym. It names the cut-together result as much as the act of cutting.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of edit.

   He spent the evening editing the final chapter of his novel.

   The team is editing the footage for tomorrow's broadcast.

   Note

   The -ing form of edit does two jobs. After a form of be it builds the progressive (she is editing the draft). On its own it works as a verb-noun that still takes an object (editing footage takes patience). That direct object is what separates it from the countable noun, which takes an article or a plural instead. Its range follows the verb: text, photographs, files, film, even DNA.

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