hatting

Pluralhattings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of hat.

   The costume crew was hatting the chorus line minutes before curtain.

   Hatting an entire regiment for the parade required dozens of fittings.

   Note

   Here the -ing belongs to a verb with several lives. Used transitively, it means putting hats on someone (hatting the chorus line) or, in church usage, making someone a cardinal. Used intransitively, it means shopping for hats, as in going hatting before a wedding. The obsolete Northern English and Scots hat, a past tense of hit, cannot produce this form at all.

   They spent the whole afternoon hatting along the high street.

   She went hatting the week before the wedding.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The making of hats as a trade or industry.

   Hatting employed hundreds of workers in the town during the nineteenth century.

   Her family had earned its living from hatting for three generations.

   Similarmillinery

   Note

   Built from hat plus -ing, the way many trades take their name from what they produce. It is uncountable: you speak of hatting or the hatting trade, never a hatting. Keep it apart from the verb form. In "hatting the guests" it is an action, putting hats on people. Here it names a whole craft or industry, and it usually stands without an article.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Cloth or material from which hats are made.

   The milliner ordered enough hatting to finish the spring collection.

   A bolt of stiff hatting leaned against the workshop wall.

   Note

   The material meaning, and the only one that takes the plural hattings. With no article it means the stuff itself, as in a bolt of hatting. With an article or in the plural it means a particular kind of hat fabric, or several kinds. Unlike the trade, which never pluralizes, this sense moves easily between mass and count uses.

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