gumming

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of gum.

   The printer is gumming the backs of the labels before they are cut.

   He spent the evening gumming photographs into the old album.

   Note

   The doubled m follows the usual rule for a short vowel before a single final consonant: gum, gummed, gumming. The form carries every sense of the verb. These range from the toothless chewing behind the noun for chewing without teeth to the colloquial gumming up, which means clogging something or stalling a process. With up, it usually signals that something has stopped working, not that glue was deliberately applied.

   Fine sand kept gumming up the gears of the old clock.

   The old dog lay by the fire, gumming a crust of bread.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The action of chewing or mashing food using the gums rather than the teeth.

   Her gumming of the soft fruit was the only way she could eat after losing her teeth.

   The infant's steady gumming gradually wore down the rubber teething ring.

   Similarchewing

   Note

   A noun that counts as easily as it sits in the mass. Toothless mouths and teething babies produce gumming in general, but also separate gummings. Don Byrd's The Poetics of the Common Knowledge (1994) mentions baby books made to withstand repeated gummings, which shows the plural at home after a word like repeated. The verb behind it, the -ing form of gum, is likewise used mostly of toothless people and animals.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The action of fastening something with gum, especially applying gum-water to a lithographic stone.

   The printer's gumming of the stone protected its blank areas from ink.

   Proper gumming kept the label fixed even in damp conditions.

   Similargluing

   Note

   Lithographers coat the stone with gum-water, a solution of gum arabic, so that the blank areas hold water and refuse ink while the image takes it. The general sense of fixing things with gum, such as labels or photographs, survives alongside. In the print shop, though, the word means that protective coat, and the natural phrase is gumming the stone.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A disease of plants, especially trees, marked by the oozing of gum from the bark or wood.

   Severe gumming weakened the apricot trees throughout the orchard.

   The gardener treated the gumming before it could spread to nearby plums.

   Similargummosis

   Note

   Gummosis is the formal name for this disease, and gumming is the plainer word for the same condition in woody plants. Gum-like substances build up in the tissues and ooze out, often after an injury, a fungal or bacterial infection, or environmental stress. The visible ooze is therefore a symptom, not the cause. Either term suits a report on ailing fruit trees.

5. 5
   nounhistoricaluncountable

   The manual removal of clay, called 'gum', from coal after it has been cut.

   After the cutting, the gumming fell to the youngest workers in the seam.

   The gumming had to be finished before the coal could be hauled out.

   Note

   A miners' term from the days of hand work. Miners called the clay clinging to cut coal gum, and clearing it away was gumming. The word belongs to histories and accounts of older pits rather than to descriptions of mining today, so it usually appears in the past tense. Keep it apart from the plant disease, which shares the spelling but nothing else.

Showing meanings only. Show all 5