lunching

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of having lunch, the meal eaten in the middle of the day.

   Lunching at noon gives the whole team a chance to catch up.

   Her habit of lunching alone gave her quiet time to read.

   Similardining, eating

   Note

   A true countable noun, not just the gerund, so it can take a plural. Alfred Emanuel Smith and Francis Walton's New Outlook (1885) describes something kept aside "for captains and their friends at lunchings," treating each meal as a separate occasion. The plural is the test: you can attend several lunchings, but a gerund such as "lunching at noon" never takes an -s.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of lunch.

   We were lunching on the terrace when the rain started.

   He spent the whole afternoon lunching with old colleagues.

   Note

   Two uses share this form. Intransitively, lunching means eating the meal, and it usually takes on or with: lunching on the terrace, lunching with old colleagues. Transitively, it means paying for someone else's meal, as when a firm is lunching its clients, and then it needs no preposition at all. As a gerund the form already behaves like a noun, which is where the noun for the occasion begins.

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