mailing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of sending something through the mail, such as a letter or package.

   The mailing of the tax documents was delayed by the holiday.

   Careful mailing of fragile goods calls for plenty of padding.

   Similarposting, dispatch, sending, shipping

   Note

   Besides the act itself, a mailing can be a single dispatch: one batch of letters or leaflets sent out to many mailboxes. In that use the noun is countable and takes a plural. Terry Helbing, writing in Gay Community News in 1987, complains of someone flooding the mailboxes of gay organizations with mailings that urge readers to join this or buy that. The noun names what arrives as much as the sending.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of mail.

   The clerk is mailing the rejected applications back to their senders.

   Mailing fragile items without padding often ends in damage.

   Note

   The -ing form does two jobs. After a form of be it builds the progressive (she is mailing the forms). As a gerund it fills a noun's place but still takes an object, often two: mailing them the forms. That object is how to tell it from the noun for the act, which needs of: the mailing of the forms. The same spelling also serves the older verb meaning "to arm with mail."

   She is mailing her sister the photos from the wedding.

   Mailing customers their receipts saves the shop a great deal of paper.

3. 3
   nounobsolete

   A farm, or a piece of land worked as one.

   The laird leased the mailing to a tenant for a yearly rent.

   Every spring the whole household turned out to plow the mailing.

   Note

   An unrelated word that only looks like the participle. It comes from mail in the old sense of "rent," so the farm took its name from the payment made for it. It is obsolete now and appears only in older writing. Using it today is a deliberate historical choice, best kept to settings where a rented holding and its tenant are the subject.

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