laddering

Pluralladderings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of ladder.

   Retirees are increasingly laddering Treasury bonds to manage interest-rate risk.

   Laddering bond maturities lets investors reinvest at regular intervals.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty: a participle after be (the tights are laddering) and a gerund that can head a phrase. Its range follows the verb. A stocking ladders from a broken thread. In British slang a gun crew ladders salvos onto a target, and in British policing the word names coercing offenders into admitting crimes they did not commit. The gerund shades into same-spelled nouns such as the bond strategy.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   An investing approach that spreads money across multiple bonds or term deposits with staggered, rolling maturity dates.

   The advisor recommended laddering so that a portion of the portfolio matured every year.

   By choosing laddering, the couple avoided locking all their cash into a single maturity date.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   An interview method, developed in the 1960s, in which the questioner drills down for greater detail at each successive step.

   Through careful laddering, the moderator uncovered the deeper values behind each purchase decision.

   The market researcher relied on laddering to move from product features to personal motivations.

   Note

   Interviewers can ladder in either direction through a hierarchy of answers. Rugg and Petre's A Gentle Guide To Research Methods (2006) describes upward laddering, which climbs from the bottom toward the top. The branches thin as you rise, so the same responses keep recurring. That repetition is a useful sign that the interview has reached the deeper, shared reasons behind people's choices.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A method of soil compaction used to break up clods and level a field.

   The heavy ground needed two plowings and three ladderings before the clods broke down and the field lay level.

   Before sowing, the crew finished a final laddering to level the seedbed.

   Similarharrowing

   Note

   A farm word that freely takes a plural. Land is prepared with so many ploughings and so many ladderings, and each one counts as a separate pass over the ground. Its natural partner is plowing, and the pairing shows where it belongs in the work: after the soil is turned, laddering compacts it, breaks the clods and evens the surface for sowing.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   A regular pattern of DNA fragment sizes appearing on an electrophoresis gel, produced when dying cells break their DNA into pieces.

   The presence of laddering confirmed that the cells had undergone programmed death rather than injury.

   Researchers look for laddering when they want evidence of apoptosis in a sample.

   Note

   A laboratory term almost always met in the phrase DNA laddering. The evenly spaced bands on the gel look like the rungs of a ladder, and their appearance is read as a sign that cells are dying. Al-Rubeai and Fussenegger's Cell Engineering: Apoptosis (2006) uses it this way, reporting that cold-stressed tobacco cultures lost viability and exhibited DNA laddering.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   An irregular pattern of cracks that develops when a material dries unevenly.

   Uneven drying left visible laddering across the slab of clay.

   The restorer found laddering in the old paint where the surface had dried inconsistently.

   Similarcracking, crazing

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