founding

1. 1
   adjective

   Describing the person, group, or act that establishes or starts an organization, institution, or movement.

   The founding charter set out the colony's basic laws.

   Several founding figures of the movement later disagreed about its direction.

   Similaroriginal, foundational, pioneering, inaugural, first

   Note

   An adjective that does not grade: a person or document is founding or it is not, and nothing is ever more founding than another. It settles into fixed pairings like founding fathers and founding charter. These are the verb's participle hardened into a label for whoever or whatever stood at the start.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of establishing or setting up something, such as an organization or a settlement.

   The founding of the republic followed years of revolution.

   Historians dispute the exact date of the museum's founding.

   Similarestablishment, foundation, creation, inception, formation

   Oppositedissolution, abolition

   Note

   The usual frame is the founding of, as in the founding of a republic, a city or a museum. There it names a single event. The noun also counts: Donatella Della Porta and Sidney Tarrow's Transnational Protest and Global Activism (2005) asks whether foundings of transnational organizations spur foundings of national ones, treating each establishment as one case among many. The plural belongs to that analytical, comparative register.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of found.

   The committee is founding a research institute next year.

   Founding the colony required royal approval.

   Note

   The verb found covers two quite different jobs, and this participle carries both. Usually it means establishing, as in founding a colony. In iron founding and brass founding it is the metalworker's verb: melting metal and pouring it into a mold, the trade of the foundry. Don't confuse it with found as the past tense of find. That verb's participle is finding, never founding.

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