forging

Pluralforgings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of shaping metal by heating it and hammering it into the desired form.

   Forging aligns the metal's internal grain, so forged parts resist stress better than cast ones.

   The workshop still relies on hand forging for its custom knives.

   Similarsmithing, hammering

   Note

   Most often a mass noun for the craft or the industrial process, it can also be counted, with one forging for each round of heating and hammering. Joynson's The Metals Used in Construction (1868) speaks of "repeated forgings and workings of wrought-iron" to mean successive operations, not objects. Modern readers can easily misread that plural, because forgings also names the finished parts.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of forge.

   The apprentice is forging a horseshoe over the glowing coals.

   Workers were forging steel beams late into the night.

   Note

   One spelling covers quite different activities. Forge can mean shaping hot metal, counterfeiting something, or pressing steadily on against resistance, so forging may describe a smith at the anvil, a counterfeiter at work, or a team forging ahead. Only context tells them apart. The nouns spelled the same way keep just the metalworking meaning, as in the process of hammering hot metal.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A component produced by shaping metal through heating and hammering, rather than by casting or machining.

   Each forging is inspected for cracks before it leaves the plant.

   Aircraft landing gear often uses titanium forgings for their strength.

   Note

   Engineering writing pairs the word with its rival product: castings and forgings, two ways of giving a metal part its shape. A 1944 Railway Magazine article on a British-built locomotive sets fabrication against both. The word is always countable and often plural, as in the Secretary of War's annual report of 1896, with its "16-inch steel gun forgings."

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