hunting

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of finding and killing a wild animal, for sport or to use its parts for food, clothing, and other goods.

   For these communities, hunting supplied not only meat but also hides for clothing.

   Trophy hunting remains controversial among conservationists and the wider public.

   Note

   This is an old noun in its own right, not just the verb at work: Old English huntung was already hunt plus the noun-forming -ing. It can be counted, too. The Encyclopædia Britannica of 1797 praises a painter's "pictures of huntings", each one a single chase set on canvas. Its look-alike, the verb form, reached the same spelling by a different road.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of searching for something, especially a job or an apartment.

   After months of job hunting, she finally accepted an offer downtown.

   Apartment hunting in a busy market means moving fast on new listings.

   Similarsearching, seeking

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of hunt.

   The wolves were hunting in a coordinated pack across the valley.

   Spending the morning hunting mushrooms, they filled two baskets.

   Note

   The participle came to its spelling separately from the noun of the chase. It goes back to Middle English huntinde and huntende, whose ending was later reshaped to -ing. Before a noun it often describes a habit rather than an action: Margery Allingham's "hunting men" in The China Governess (1963) are men who hunt, not men out hunting that day. It carries every sense of hunt, including the bell-ringer's shifting of a bell through changes.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Fluctuation or oscillation in a system that fails to settle at a stable value.

   Like a thermostat that keeps overshooting, heating and cooling without ever settling.

   Persistent hunting in the speed governor prevented the turbine from holding a steady rpm.

   The control loop showed hunting whenever the load changed suddenly.

   Similaroscillation, fluctuation, instability

   Oppositestability

   Note

   The image is of a system searching for its target and never landing on it: the output overshoots, corrects, undershoots, and starts again. The word usually follows the part that misbehaves, as in bogie hunting on railways. Trains Illustrated drew the key line in 1961: such hunting comes from dynamic instability in the whole bogie-plus-body assembly, not from a periodic disturbance pushing it, and that is what sets it apart from ordinary forced vibration.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The process of selecting which line in a group of telephone lines will receive an incoming call.

   Like a receptionist trying each extension in turn until someone picks up.

   The phone system uses hunting to find an open line when the main number is busy.

   Office switchboards rely on hunting to distribute calls across several lines.

   Note

   Telephone switching borrowed the idea of a search. The exchange tests the lines of a hunt group one after another and routes the call to the first line it finds idle. Callers never see any of this; they dial one number and reach whichever line is free. Engineers usually use the word as a mass noun, and they call the set of lines being searched a hunt group.

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