patterning

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The forming of an ordered, repeated arrangement of shapes, marks, or colors, or the arrangement so produced.

   The fabric's intricate patterning drew every eye in the room.

   Repeated freezing and thawing created a strange patterning across the rock surface.

   Similarpattern, design, markings

   Note

   The noun works both as a mass word and as a count word: the patterning of a fabric, or patternings repeated across a rock face. Pattern names the design itself, while patterning stresses the arrangement or the act of making it. Mathematics gives it an exact sense. Kim Williams and Michael J. Ostwald (2015) define tiling as any geometric patterning that covers a surface using a finite set of shapes.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of pattern.

   The committee is patterning its bylaws on those of older organizations.

   She spent the evening patterning fabric for the costume.

   Note

   Built on the verb, this form works after be for action in progress, or as a gerund naming the activity itself. It usually introduces its model with after, from or by: patterning a design after an older one. One use is specialized: patterning an animal means watching it over time to learn its habitual movements. Unlike the noun for an arrangement, the gerund takes an object and never a plural.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act of shaping one's behavior, work, or design to follow another taken as a model, often expressed as following after something.

   Her prose's patterning after the great essayists is obvious in every paragraph.

   The constitution's patterning after earlier republics gave it a familiar structure.

   Similarmodeling, imitation

   Note

   The model usually follows after: a patterning after one's elders, after a teacher, after a life. The scope is a whole manner rather than a single design. H.W. Nutt in 1916 wrote of children taking on the dress of those they admire. Douglas Webster in 2001 wrote of a commitment to a patterning after Christ's life. The arrangement sense, by contrast, concerns shapes and surfaces.

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