fairing
Pluralfairings
Pluralfairings
- 1A covering fitted to parts of a vehicle such as an aircraft, car, or motorcycle to smooth its exterior and reduce drag.
Like the sleek nose of a bullet train, shaped so air flows around it with little resistance.
Wind-tunnel tests showed that the new fairing trimmed drag at highway speeds.
The team bolted a lightweight fairing over the exposed landing gear.
Note
The verb behind it is fair, "to smooth", so a fairing is literally a smoothing. It belongs wherever bare machinery meets moving air, not only on aircraft and motorcycles. H. C. Casserley, writing in Railway Magazine in October 1950, describes one over a steam locomotive's driving motion. It was later removed so the working parts were easier to reach: the usual trade-off between a smooth skin and access.
- 2Present participle and gerund of fair.
The boatbuilder kept fairing the planks until the joints disappeared.
Fairing a curved surface by hand takes a steady eye.
Note
The -ing form of an unrelated verb fair, meaning to smooth a surface, ease a junction, or bring rivet holes into line. The same verb gives the streamlining cover its name. In these senses fair is transitive, so the participle takes an object: fairing the hull, fairing a joint. The weather sense is the exception: skies can be fairing with no object at all.
- 3A small gingerbread cookie, similar to a hard ginger snap.
The bakery sold spiced fairings by the dozen during the holidays.
She snapped a fairing in half and shared it with her brother.
Note
Named for where it was sold: cakes and sweets were fair food, and the small gingerbread biscuit took the name. In Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857), the booths display "fairings and eatables," which shows how close the edible sense stays to the souvenir sense. Ginger nut is its closest everyday equivalent.
Less common meanings
- 4Something bought at a fair as a present or as a memento of the visit.
Like a keepsake snow globe carried back from a vacation town.
Among the cart's clutter were beads and whistles, fairings for the village youngsters.
She told me she was on her way to the fair in Bolzano and assumed I was going there too. Should we meet there, I must buy her a fairing [translating Jahrmarkt].
1962, JW Goethe, Italian JourneyNote
A word made from the fair itself, the market or community gathering: the fairing was what you brought home from it. It is now archaic, and still useful for period color. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer use it in their 1962 translation of Goethe's Italian Journey, for a gift promised at the fair in Bolzano. In modern prose, a reader may take it first for the streamlining cover.
- 5A gift of any kind, especially a token given by one lover to another.
Like a love token exchanged quietly between sweethearts.
The young man saved for months to buy a fairing worthy of his beloved.
Tucked among the faded letters lay a fairing from her first love.
Note
The fair has dropped out of the picture here. A present of any kind, above all a lover's token, keeps the name that once belonged to the souvenir from a fair. Now rare, it suits historical fiction and pastiche. In ordinary present-day prose, gift or keepsake says the same thing without the period flavor.
- 6Something that is deserved; what one has coming, by way of reward or punishment.
Like the saying that you reap what you sow.
Let the tyrant receive his fairing at the hands of those he wronged.
Honest labor brings its fairing soon enough, the old folk insisted.
Note
Scots and Irish English turned the gift into a reckoning: your fairing is what you have coming. It can be reward or punishment, and only context tells which, much as with one's deserts. Now rare even in those varieties, it is best kept to dialogue or writing that deliberately evokes Scotland or Ireland.
Showing meanings only.
fairing is a form of fair
fair, verb: Of the weather, to become favorable: clear and no longer stormy. Full entry
- Spelling
- fair → fairing: add -ing
Practice
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Origins
From fair ("community gathering, market"). The sense referring to food arose because cakes and sweets were sold at fairs.
From fair ("to smoothen or even a surface").