panning

Pluralpannings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of pan.

   The prospectors spent weeks panning the river gravel for flecks of gold.

   Critics are panning the director's latest film for its weak story.

   Note

   The doubled n follows the usual rule for short verbs ending in a single consonant: pan, panned, panning. The participle carries every sense of the verb, and its grammar shifts with them. Prospectors and critics are panning something, whether gravel or a film, while a camera is simply panning, with no object, as it turns horizontally. As a gerund it shades into the nouns for washing for gold and a harsh review.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The action of washing gravel, sand, or dirt in a shallow pan to separate out gold or other valuable minerals.

   Decades of panning had left the prospector with calloused hands and a small fortune in gold dust.

   She earned a modest living from panning the creek beds each summer.

3. 3
   nouncolloquialcountable

   A severe and thorough negative review or criticism, especially of a creative work.

   The play opened to a brutal panning that closed it within a week.

   Despite the panning from reviewers, audiences flocked to the film.

   Similarslating, savaging, mauling, roasting, drubbing

   Oppositerave, acclaim, praise

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The action of placing or moving a sound between the left and right channels of a stereo field.

   Careful panning gave each instrument its own space in the stereo image.

   The producer relied on subtle panning to create a sense of movement.

   Note

   In the mixing room, a sound's position is set by level rather than by actual motion. It seems to sit left or right because it is louder in one output channel than in another, and the same principle extends to multichannel setups. Engineers treat it as a countable operation, listed alongside fades among a console's basic moves, so "pannings and fades" is ordinary studio talk.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The sand, gravel, or other material that has been washed in a pan to separate out gold or minerals.

   She sifted through the panning carefully, hoping for a few grains of gold.

   The panning yielded nothing but worthless black sand.

   Note

   Here the word moves from the work of washing to what that work leaves behind, and in survey writing it often turns plural and countable. Mineralogists speak of finding something "in pannings from" a particular spot, such as a mine dump, and a rare mineral like metazeunerite can be identified that way. The word therefore belongs to mineral surveying as much as to gold prospecting.

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