preferring

Pluralpreferrings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of prefer.

   Preferring fresh ingredients, the chef shopped at the market each morning.

   Many readers, preferring print to screens, still buy physical books.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every meaning of prefer, not only liking one thing better. In legal and official language it means formally presenting something to an authority, as in preferring charges. In older prose it can mean advancing or promoting someone. The doubled r follows the stress on the verb's final syllable. As a gerund it names the habit itself: preferring tea is still a choice.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A preference; the act or result of choosing one thing over another.

   His preferring of solitude to company defined much of his later life.

   There was an unmistakable preferring of tradition over innovation in the council.

   Similarpreference, favoring, partiality, predilection

   Note

   A noun that takes a plural, preferrings, and is useful where preference sounds too settled. In Cahn, Kitcher and Sher's Reason at Work (1984), one passage defends "our preferrings" against the bad name of "the machinery of motives": they are what we feel in ourselves when we decide. It suits writing about the act of choosing as it happens. For an ordinary liking, preference remains the natural word.

3. 3
   verbobsolete

   Present participle of preferre, an obsolete spelling of prefer.

   Note

   An older spelling hides behind a modern-looking form. Preferre, an obsolete way of writing prefer, drops its final e before -ing and lands on exactly the same letters as the modern participle. On the page the two cannot be told apart. Only the way the base verb is spelled elsewhere in an old text shows which form a writer used, and the meaning is read just as for prefer.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3