picturing

Pluralpicturings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of picture.

   Picturing the finished house helped them plan the renovation.

   He spent the long drive picturing how the meeting might unfold.

   Note

   An -ing form that does two jobs. As a participle it carries on the verb (she was picturing the scene), and as a gerund it names the activity itself (picturing the result helps). Either way it can point outward or inward: picturing a landscape on canvas, or picturing how a meeting might unfold. Once it can be counted, it has become the noun for a depiction.

2. 2
   noun

   A visual representation of something; the act or result of depicting a subject in images.

   The novel's vivid picturing of frontier hardship stayed with readers for years.

   Critics praised the film's unflinching picturing of wartime loss.

   Similardepiction, portrayal, representation, rendering

   Note

   A true noun, so it can be counted and made plural: William Motherwell's The Madman's Love (c. 1832) mourns that time never dimmed "the picturings of the heart." Those images are held in memory, not painted, which echoes the verb picture's sense of imagining. In criticism, followed by of, it names how a work portrays its subject: a picturing of frontier life.

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