identifying

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of identify.

   The detective is identifying the suspects from the lineup.

   Identifying the cause of the outage required hours of testing.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs here. With a form of be it builds the progressive (she is identifying the bird). As a gerund it fills a noun slot while still taking an object (identifying the cause took hours). It keeps every pattern of identify, including the reflexive and intransitive ones: identifying with a group, identifying oneself with a cause. Unlike the noun for a single act, it never takes a plural.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   An act of recognizing or establishing the identity of someone or something.

   The identifying of the remains took the forensic team several weeks.

   Careful identifying of each specimen prevented errors later in the study.

   Similaridentification, recognition, determination

   Note

   A countable noun, and its plural is where that shows. R. R. Cox's Schutz's Theory of Relevance (2012) speaks of identifyings set against distinguishings, each one a separate mental act. Outside such technical prose, the act is usually called an identification. Identifying as a noun tends to appear with the and of (the identifying of the remains), where it stresses the process rather than the result.

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