eventing
- 1A competitive equestrian sport combining dressage, cross-country, and showjumping; also a similar contest run with motor cars.
Like a triathlon, but for a horse-and-rider team competing across three disciplines.
Olympic eventing requires the same horse and rider to compete across all three phases.
She qualified for the national eventing championships after a strong cross-country round.
Note
The name of the whole sport, not of any single contest, built simply from event plus -ing. Like most sport names it is usually uncountable, and riders compete in eventing, as Katie Thomas wrote in 2009 of one rider's return to the saddle. A single meeting is a horse trial or an eventing competition, not "an eventing."
- 2A mechanism by which one part of a program signals another that something has happened, using raised events.
Like a newspaper that publishes stories any reader can pick up, without the writer knowing who reads them.
The framework relies on eventing to coordinate independent components.
Robust eventing allows services to broadcast notifications without knowing who will respond.
Note
A programmer's word for the whole arrangement, not for any one signal. The verb that goes with it is raise. One piece of code raises, or signals, an event when some condition comes up, and another piece handles it, as Windows PowerShell 2.0 Bible (2011) explains. The sender never needs to know who is listening, so eventing keeps components loosely coupled.
- 3The occurrence or taking place of an event, considered as a happening in its own right.
Similaroccurrence, happening
Note
A rare word of social-science writing, chosen when a thinker wants to treat a happening as a process rather than a thing. John Shotter, drawing on Whorf in 1993, speaks of the world "in which the eventing takes place" and even pluralizes it as "eventings", though the word is usually uncountable. Outside such theoretical prose, most readers will hear the equestrian competition instead.
Less common meaning
- 4Present participle of event. Obsolete.
Note
A participle of a verb that has dropped out of English. Event once meant to occur. It also meant to be breathed out or evaporate, and, with an object, to expose something to the air. Eventing could carry any of these meanings. Today readers will hear the equestrian sport instead, so in current writing use occurring or taking place.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of eventing apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Formed from "event" combined with the suffix "-ing".