figuring

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of figure.

   He spent the evening figuring the cost of the whole trip.

   Figuring out the new schedule occupied the team for a full day.

   Note

   The participle carries every sense of figure, so the surrounding words pick the meaning. Figuring the cost is calculating, figuring out a schedule is coming to understand, and figuring that he'd be late is supposing; the first two are American uses. Without an object it can mean taking part, as in figuring in the plans. With a possessive, my figuring shades into the noun for calculation.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of calculating or working out numbers and amounts.

   The contractor's figuring showed the project would run over budget.

   Careful figuring kept the household accounts in balance all year.

   Similarcalculation, reckoning, computation, arithmetic

   Note

   Most at home in the phrase by my figuring, which offers an estimate as one's own reckoning rather than as settled fact. Tim Sandlin's Western Swing (2011) uses it to guess a man's age from his looks. The word can be counted as well as massed (alternative figurings), and it stretches easily from arithmetic to working anything out, including ways of interpreting the everyday.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The structure, design, or arrangement of a thing's visible form.

   The cabinet's beauty came from the rich figuring of its walnut panels.

   Delicate figuring ran across the surface of the woven cloth.

   Similarpattern, patterning, grain

   Note

   A pattern word that readily takes a plural. The Clothier and Furnisher of 1894 sets narrow stripings and small figurings side by side, each -ing naming one kind of ornament in a fabric. Herrman S. Saroni's Musical Grammar (1863) applies it to written music, with figurings read against the tonic signature. Keep it apart from the "representation" meaning: here the figuring is the pattern itself, not a picture of something else.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The representation of something through images, shapes, or symbols.

   The figuring of grief in the sculpture moved everyone who saw it.

   Medieval art relied on the figuring of saints to tell its stories.

   Similardepiction, representation, portrayal, rendering

   Note

   At home in criticism and theory, where a film or text is said to figure an idea, and its figurings are the ways it gives that idea shape. Vincent J. Hausmann writes in 2011 of a film's figurings of anality in a father-son relation. The usual construction is the figuring(s) of plus the thing represented. It signals interpretation: the critic is reading how something is shown, not simply listing what is pictured.

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