paralleling

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of parallel.

   The coastal trail keeps paralleling the shoreline before turning inland.

   Her career, paralleling her mentor's almost exactly, led to the same office.

   Note

   An -ing form that does double duty. It works as a participle in a road paralleling the river, and as a gerund when it names the act itself. It carries the verb's full range, from running alongside a path or coast to matching, likening, or being analogous to something. The final l stays single before -ing. Once the gerund takes a plural, it has become the countable noun.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The process of making or becoming figuratively parallel, drawing two things into close correspondence.

   The biography's constant paralleling of the two leaders' careers grew tiresome.

   Critics praised the novel's paralleling of personal grief and national decline.

   Similarcomparison, juxtaposition

   Oppositecontrast

   Note

   Criticism is where this noun earns its keep. Unlike the bare gerund, it counts and pluralizes. Richard Hornby, in Drama, Metadrama and Perception (1986), warns against accepting "such parallelings of polarities without question." It usually takes an of-phrase naming what is set side by side, and it suits analytical writing about plays, novels or lives.

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