hoarding

Pluralhoardings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of hoard.

   Investors were accused of hoarding gold while the currency collapsed.

   She has been hoarding every scrap of gossip about the new manager, waiting for the right moment to use it.

   Note

   As a verb form it takes what is stored up as its direct object: hoarding gold, hoarding cash, hoarding every scrap of gossip. What is hoarded can be knowledge or grudges kept in mind as well as goods. It follows be in progressive tenses (she has been hoarding) and comes after accused of or stop, while the same spelling also stands as a noun for the practice of stockpiling.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The practice of accumulating goods and keeping them as a store.

   Rich countries were criticized for the hoarding of vaccines while poorer nations waited for supplies.

   Rumors of a rice shortage set off a wave of panic buying and hoarding across the city.

   Similarstockpiling, accumulation

   Note

   The stockpiling sense, built on hoard as in a hidden store and quite separate from the castle and building-site words. It usually takes of before what is kept back, as in the hoarding of vaccines, raw materials and patent rights, or goes in front as a compound, vaccine hoarding. It often travels with panic buying, and the blame it carries falls on whoever keeps more than a fair share.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   An anxiety disorder marked by a compulsive need to accumulate goods and by anxiety or discomfort at the thought of discarding them.

   The therapist specializes in hoarding and helps clients decide, one box at a time, what they can let go.

   Firefighters said the man's hoarding had blocked every exit in the apartment.

   Note

   Clinical writing often names the condition in full, as hoarding disorder or compulsive hoarding, which keeps it apart from everyday stockpiling. What marks it is not the amount of stuff but the distress: discarding things brings real anxiety, so possessions pile up until a home becomes hard, or even dangerous, to live in. It is treated as a complex condition needing targeted help, not a matter of tidiness.

4. 4
   nounCommonwealthIrelandUKcountable

   A large outdoor board for displaying advertisements, known in the US as a billboard.

   The supermarket's Christmas advert was plastered across every hoarding in central London.

   The candidate's face smiled down from the hoardings along the main road into Dublin.

   Similarbillboard

   Note

   The everyday word for a billboard in Britain, Ireland and much of the Commonwealth, grown from the fence around a building site, whose boards carried posters. In the plural it can stand for public advertising as a whole: Orwell's Big Brother is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. Giant is its favorite companion, as in a car pictured on a giant hoarding.

5. 5
   nounAustraliaCanadaHong KongIrelandNew ZealandUKcountable

   A temporary fence-like structure built around a construction site to make it secure and protect the public from accidents.

   The developer covered the hoarding with pictures of the luxury flats that would one day stand behind it.

   Most of the station was hidden behind hoardings while the platforms were rebuilt.

   Note

   A building-site word across Britain and Ireland, and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Its boards face the street, so they rarely stay bare: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure finds posters on one around a chapel's foundations, and developers now cover them with glossy pictures of homes to come. People usually speak of what lies behind the hoardings, which hide the work as well as fence it.

6. 6
   nounhistoricalcountable

   A roofed timber structure fitted over a castle's battlements and jutting out beyond them to protect the defenders.

   Archers crouched in the hoarding and fired down on the soldiers trying to scale the wall.

   Restorers rebuilt the timber hoardings along the north tower using medieval carpentry methods.

   Note

   A castle-builder's word, unrelated to stored-up goods: it comes from an older hoard meaning a projecting wooden structure on a fortification, close kin to the brattice that later took its place. Jutting out past the wall, it let defenders shoot or drop things straight down on attackers at the foot of the wall. Today it belongs to historians and restorers of medieval buildings.

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