paging

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of page.

   The front desk is paging the guest who left her phone by the pool.

   The hospital kept paging the surgeon throughout the emergency.

   Note

   Two unrelated families of verb share this form. One is bookish: numbering pages, furnishing folios, turning several pages at once. The other concerns people: attending someone as a page, or calling them. The older US sense of simply summoning someone is now obsolete, and contacting someone by pager is dated. As a gerund, the bookish branch shades into the noun for page layout.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   In computing, the moving of pages of data back and forth between main memory and a secondary store, such as a hard disk drive.

   Excessive paging slowed the server to a crawl during peak load.

   The operating system relies on paging to run programs larger than physical memory.

   Similarswapping

   Note

   A memory-management term: the operating system moves fixed-size blocks, called pages, between physical RAM and backing storage. The word works both ways grammatically. Countable, a paging is one such transfer. Uncountable, paging is the whole scheme, and it is the form behind phrases like heavy paging or excessive paging, which describe a system spending its effort shuttling data instead of running programs.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The arrangement and ordering of pages within a book or other publication.

   The designer adjusted the paging so no chapter ended on a blank leaf.

   Poor paging left several photographs separated from their captions.

   Similarpagination

   Note

   Librarians and cataloguers count it. RDA: Resource Description and Access (2013) describes a book whose pages run in more than one sequence as being "in various pagings," alongside "in various foliations" for works numbered by leaves. That plural is the usage worth noticing: as a mass noun the word covers page layout in general, and as a countable noun it names each distinct run of pages.

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