horsing

Pluralhorsings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of horse.

   The new recruits spent their break horsing around near the barracks.

   He hurt his wrist while horsing around with his brother.

   Note

   The -ing form does most of its work in the phrase horsing around, as in kids horsing around in the yard. The same spelling also serves the verb's rarer transitive uses: supplying horses, bestriding something, or playing pranks on someone. As a gerund it can head a noun phrase (horsing around got him hurt). Keep it apart from the flogging punishment, a separate countable noun with the plural horsings.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A military punishment in which a person was placed on the back of another or on a wooden horse to be flogged.

   The court-martial sentenced the deserter to a horsing before the assembled regiment.

   Many veterans dreaded the horsing more than any other penalty.

   Note

   Beyond the barracks, the word belonged to the schoolroom too. In Thomas Dick's The Educational Magazine (1838), a boy "got one or two horsings over a Chapter of Genesis," flogged through his lessons. The noun is countable, so a person could receive several horsings. William Oxberry, in 1826, sets the word off in inverted commas beside "other little tender attentions". By then the punishment was already a subject for rueful irony.

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