fruiting

Pluralfruitings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of fruit.

   Several of the older vines are finally fruiting again.

   The fig tree began fruiting much earlier than expected this season.

   Note

   The verb form is built on fruit in its broadest sense, to produce fruit, seeds, or spores, so it suits a mushroom bed as well as a fig tree. With a form of be it makes the progressive (the vines are fruiting). As a gerund it edges toward the noun for the process. Only the noun uses take a plural, fruitings; the verb form never does.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Fructification, the stage or process in which a plant or fungus bears fruit, seeds, or spores.

   Botanists tracked the fruiting of several oak populations to study climate effects.

   Abundant rainfall encouraged early fruiting across the vineyard.

   Similarfructification

   Note

   The mass noun for the process works as often in front of another noun as on its own: the fruiting period of cotton, or the changes that stimulate fruiting in cultivated mushrooms. Growers use it for crops and fungi alike. Fructification is its Latinate equivalent. Where the clipped name for the structure can be counted, this sense takes no plural.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   The spore-bearing structure produced by a fungus or similar organism, such as a mushroom or bracket.

   The biologist cataloged every fruiting she found along the rotting log.

   Bracket fungi form woody fruitings that can persist for years on a tree trunk.

   Note

   A clipped form of fruiting body, and unlike the process noun it can be counted: one fruiting, many fruitings. A single fruiting need not be a single structure. Foissner and Hawksworth's Protist Diversity and Geographical Distribution (2009) describes fruitings made of several thousand individual sporocarps. Sporocarp is the precise word for each spore-bearing unit, while fruiting can name the whole cluster.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The occurrence of unsynchronized, uncorrelated false replies received by a secondary radar from transponders responding to other interrogators.

   Dense traffic over the hub produced constant fruiting on the approach radar.

   The system's defruiter suppresses fruiting before the returns reach the display.

   Note

   An acronym has been turned into an ordinary -ing noun: FRUIT stands for false replies unsynchronized (or uncorrelated) in time. It belongs to radar troubleshooting vocabulary alongside garbling and over-interrogation, as in Phil Croucher's Air Navigation With The Jeppesen CR-3 (2015). The circuit that filters it out is a defruiter. Despite the spelling, it has no connection to the botanical meaning.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4