quoting

Pluralquotings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of quote.

   The lawyer was quoting an earlier ruling to support her argument.

   Quoting the original text accurately matters a great deal in scholarly work.

   Note

   One spelling does two grammatical jobs. As a participle it carries the progressive (she was quoting an earlier ruling) and brings along every sense of the verb, from repeating someone's words to naming a price, as in quoting a figure for the roof. As a gerund it acts like a noun yet still takes an object, as in quoting the text. That object is what separates it from the countable noun, whose plural is quotings.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A statement repeated word for word from a source; a quote.

   The article opened with a quoting from the president's recent address.

   Each chapter begins with a quoting drawn from medieval correspondence.

   Similarquotation, citation, excerpt, extract, epigraph

   Note

   A countable noun built from the verb, so it can be counted and pluralized. In Alan Filreis's Counter-revolution of the Word (2012), assertions spread through "variations, quotings, and paraphrasings." It sits naturally in a list of -ing nouns like these, each naming one act of repetition. For a single quoted line, quote or quotation is the familiar choice. Unlike the gerund, this noun takes no object.

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