pulsing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of pulse.

   Blood was pulsing through the artery with every heartbeat.

   She felt her temples pulsing after the long, exhausting shift.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty across very different verbs. Cooks use it transitively, pulsing nuts in a food processor so they break up without turning to paste. Laboratories speak of pulsing a cell culture with a short dose of a drug or label. Intransitively it is the literary throb of blood or a heartbeat. Once it names a thing and takes a plural, pulsings, it has become the noun for rhythmic beating.

   She kept pulsing the almonds until they were coarsely chopped.

   The researchers were pulsing the cultures with a labeled amino acid.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The rhythmic beating or throbbing of something that pulses.

   The steady pulsing of the engine could be felt through the floor.

   A faint pulsing in her wrist told the nurse the patient was still alive.

   Similarthrobbing, beating, pulsation, pounding, throb

   Note

   Beyond hearts and engines, the word stretches to any regular recurrence. Charles M. Sherover's The Human Experience of Time (1975) pairs "periodicities or pulsings" for the cycles of change we call processes. Notice the countable plural: pulsings treats each beat as a unit. Here the thing beats or throbs in itself, whereas the emission sense describes a source sending pulses outward.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The release of pulses, such as bursts of light, sound, or electrical energy.

   The pulsing of the transmitter released a signal every few seconds.

   Engineers measured the pulsing of the laser to find each burst's energy.

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