equipping

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of equip.

   The charity is equipping rural clinics with modern diagnostic tools.

   Equipping a new laboratory requires careful budgeting and planning.

   Note

   The final p doubles before the ending, so equip becomes equipping, never equiping. The verb is transitive and its usual partner is with: equipping a ship with rigging, equipping troops with weapons. The same construction carries over to skills, as in equipping students with a trade. As a gerund it names the act of supplying, while the noun for gear names what is supplied.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The equipment provided for a particular task or purpose.

   The sale covered the clinic's furniture, its medical equipping, and two delivery vans.

   The theater's equipping, from the stage lights to the sound desk, was decades old and badly worn.

   Similarequipment, fittings, gear

   Note

   Here the -ing word stops naming an action and names the things themselves, and it takes a plural, equippings. The Journal of Social Research (1969) sets it beside a natural partner, "household furnishings and equippings." There the two -ings plurals list a home's fittings together. That pairing shows where the word sits most comfortably: in inventories of what a place or person has been supplied with.

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