floating

Pluralfloatings (some meanings)

1. 1
   adjective

   Able to float; resting on the surface of a liquid or held up in the air rather than sinking.

   Rescuers reached the floating debris before it scattered across the harbor.

   A floating platform anchored offshore served as the divers' base.

   Similarbuoyant

   Oppositesunken

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of float.

   She spent the afternoon floating lazily on her back in the pool.

   Bits of cork were floating across the surface of the tank.

   Note

   The -ing form does both of the verb's jobs. It builds progressive tenses with be (the raft was floating downstream), and it serves as a noun (floating takes practice). Because float can also mean to make something float, the participle can take an object: floating logs down a river. The same spelling doubles as the adjective. A floating raft describes the raft, while floating a raft is an action.

3. 3
   adjective

   Not fixed in position or opinion; free to move or drift rather than held in one place.

   The committee kept a few floating seats open for late appointments.

   A large bloc of floating voters decided the election.

   Similaruncommitted, undecided, flexible

   Oppositefixed

   Note

   The figurative stretch of the word, with the busiest collocations: floating voters, who have not settled on a party; a floating population, which moves rather than stays put; floating toolbars, which can be dragged anywhere on a screen. It reaches the mind too. Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Romance and Reality (1831) speaks of "some floating fancy", a notion not yet fixed. It is not comparable: a voter is floating or not, never more floating.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The motion of an object as it rests and drifts on a liquid or hangs in the air.

   The gentle floating of the boat on the lake calmed the children.

   Astronauts described the eerie floating of every loose object inside the cabin.

   Similardrifting

5. 5
   noununcountableplural

   Solid material that rests on the surface of a liquid rather than settling or sinking.

   Workers raked the floating away from the intake screen each morning.

   After the flood, a mat of floating clogged the narrow channel.

   Similarflotsam

   Note

   Usually plural: floatings names the material as a collection. The Journal of Microscopy of 1898 describes a mud "rich in floatings." Like sweepings or shavings, the plural names stuff left behind or gathered by a process. That -s is also what separates it from the motion of floating. Floatings are things on the surface, not movement across it.

6. 6
   adjective

   In phonology, describing a feature that is not linked to any consonant or vowel within its own morpheme.

   The analysis posits a floating tone that docks onto the following vowel.

   She marked the floating nasal feature that surfaces only across a word boundary.

   Note

   A term from the analysis of tone. The feature usually described this way is a tone that belongs to a morpheme but has no vowel or consonant of its own to sit on. Phonologists say such a tone docks onto a neighboring segment when conditions allow. Unlike the general "free to drift" sense, the word here is a precise label for a missing link, not a loose description.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   The act of spreading and leveling a coat of plaster across the surface of a wall.

   Once the first coat had set, the crew moved on to the floating.

   Even floating left the bedroom walls ready for their final finish.

8. 8
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A veterinary dental procedure that files down the sharp edges that form on a horse's teeth.

   Annual floating corrects the sharp points that develop on a horse's molars.

   The mare needed a floating after she began dropping half-chewed hay.

   Note

   Equine dentistry has its own use of the word. Floating is the rasping of the enamel points that form on a horse's cheek teeth as they wear unevenly. Left alone, those points can cut the cheeks and tongue, and filing them restores an even chewing surface. It is a countable procedure, so a horse needs a floating. Like the plasterer's sense, it means making a surface even.

Showing meanings only. Show all 8