pocketing

Pluralpocketings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of pocket.

   The clerk was caught pocketing money from the register.

   Pocketing the keys, he slipped quietly out the back door.

   Note

   Here the -ing form does double duty. It is a participle in "she was pocketing the change" and a gerund in "pocketing the keys was a mistake." It carries every meaning of the verb, from sinking a ball into a table's pocket to the informal taking of what is not one's own, the meaning the noun for illicit taking shares. The dated sense of bearing an insult quietly belongs to older prose.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of taking something, usually by illicitly purloining it.

   The quiet pocketing of unsold tickets went unnoticed for months.

   Auditors uncovered the systematic pocketing of customer payments.

   Similartheft, embezzlement, pilfering, misappropriation

   Note

   A noun that readily takes a plural, counting each act of taking separately: Edward Chalfant's Better in Darkness (1994), a biography of Henry Adams, tallies a senator's "illicit pocketings of money." Because the dishonest reading is the usual one, the word already suggests something underhanded. If you mean an innocent taking, the surrounding context has to make that clear.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Material used to make the pockets in clothing.

   The factory ordered rolls of cotton pocketing for the new trouser line.

   Sturdy pocketing keeps coins from wearing through the lining.

   Note

   A sewing-room word for the cloth that forms the inside of a pocket, kept distinct from lining fabric and from self-fabric, the garment's own cloth. The plural names kinds of it. Creative Publishing International's Tailoring (2011) warns against "stiff pocketings of 100 percent polyester." For patch pockets, it advises cutting the linings from lining fabric to reduce bulk.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A structure that resembles a pocket or pouch in shape.

   Erosion carved a pocketing into the limestone wall.

   A pocketing of trapped gas formed inside the cooling lava.

   Similarhollow, cavity, recess, pouch

   Note

   Biologists use the word for small pouch-like folds in tissue. Terry A. Vaughan and James M. Ryan's Mammalogy (2011) describes heat-sensing pocketings in the noseleaves of vampire bats, which help them find a spot on their prey rich in blood vessels. In descriptive writing like this, it often appears in the plural, followed by in or of to place the structure.

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