goring

Pluralgorings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of gore.

   Rangers found a buffalo goring a lion that had come too close to the calves.

   Keep your distance, because a cornered wild boar is quite capable of goring a hiker.

   Note

   Gore drops its final e before -ing. The form does two very different jobs: an animal goring someone with a horn or tusk, and a dressmaker or sailmaker goring a skirt or sail by setting in triangular pieces. Older writing also used goring for piercing with a spear, smearing with blood or wounding someone's feelings, uses now obsolete.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The act of piercing someone with a horn, or the wound it leaves, usually from a bull in bullfighting.

   The matador survived a goring in the thigh and was back in the ring by summer.

   Organizers added padded barriers after two gorings at last year's rodeo.

   Note

   The noun counts, so a matador survives a goring and a bad season brings several gorings. The bullring is its home, but any horned animal will do: Mark St. Amant's Committed: Confessions of a Fantasy Football Junkie (2004) jokes about fatal rodeo-clown gorings. It names the attack and the wound alike, so a goring in the thigh is both.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   In textiles, a piece of cloth cut diagonally so that it appears wider.

   The dressmaker set a narrow goring into each side of the bodice.

   Each goring was cut on the bias of the linen to make the panel look broader.

   Note

   This belongs to the cloth-shaping side of gore, the triangular piece let into a skirt, apron or sail. The piece is cut on the bias, at a slant to the threads rather than along or straight across them, so the panel it fills looks broader than it is. In meaning it stands well apart from the horn wound; a sewing context is what tells the reader which goring is meant.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of a sail, cut with a gradual slope so that it is broader at the clew than at the earing.

   The sailmaker marked out the canvas for a goring royal, broad at the clews and narrow at the head.

   The topgallant on the model ship is goring, tapering toward the yard above it.

   Note

   The terms come from the square sail: the clew is a lower corner, and the earing is the small rope that lashes an upper corner to its yard. A goring sail therefore widens from head to foot, the same flare that a diagonally cut panel gives a skirt. The adjective is not compared; a sail is goring or it is not.

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