preserving

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of preserve.

   Volunteers are preserving the old farmhouse one room at a time.

   Preserving these films requires careful control of temperature and humidity.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every sense of the verb preserve: protecting from harm, keeping something intact, and putting up fruit or meat with sugar or salt. As a gerund it still behaves like a verb and takes a direct object (preserving these films). That is how to tell it from the noun meaning 'preservation', which is followed by an of-phrase instead. The noun preserve, meaning jam or a nature reserve, plays no part in it.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act or process of keeping something in good condition and protecting it from decay, harm, or loss.

   The preserving of historic sites depends on steady public funding.

   Careful preserving has kept these manuscripts legible for centuries.

   Similarpreservation, conservation, protection, upkeep

   Oppositedestruction, neglect

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this noun can be counted. Wilbur Olin Hedrick's The Economics of a Food Supply (1924) writes of "some preservings of foods", meaning separate acts or batches of putting food by. In that plural use it names individual operations rather than the general process. For the abstract idea, preservation is its plainer equivalent. The of-phrase after it marks it off from the verb form.

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