encountering

Pluralencounterings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of encounter.

   Encountering such fierce resistance, the climbers decided to turn back.

   The crew reported encountering thick fog off the coast.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. As a participle it heads a clause (encountering resistance, they turned back), and as a gerund it fills a noun slot (after encountering fog). It nearly always takes a direct object, since you encounter something; the intransitive 'meet one another' is rare. In Indian English the verb is also a grim euphemism for an extrajudicial killing, so context matters.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A meeting or coming-together; an encounter.

   A brief encountering with an old teacher changed the course of her career.

   Each encountering between the two leaders eased the tension a little more.

   Similarmeeting

   Note

   Here the -ing form has hardened into a countable noun with its own plural, encounterings. It is at home in philosophical prose: Sepp and Embree's Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (2010) sets encounterings beside things-as-encountered, keeping the act of meeting in view. In everyday writing the plain noun encounter does the same work with less weight.

3. 3
   adjectiveobsolete

   Suitable or prepared for an encounter or battle.

   Let vs put on our meet incountering mindes, And in deteſting ſuch a diueliſh Thiefe, In loue of honor and defence of right Be arm’d againſt the hate of ſuch a foe, Whether from earth, or hell, or heauen he grow.

   c. 1587, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. The First Part

   Note

   Marlowe used the word in Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587–1588), where a speaker urges 'meet incountering mindes,' minds fit to face a foe. That spelling uses an in- form of the prefix. The sense survives only in reading such older texts. Today ready for battle says it plainly, because encountering before a noun would be read as the verb's participle.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3