racking

Pluralrackings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of rack.

   Fits of coughing kept racking her thin frame through the night.

   The new clerk spent the afternoon racking bottles in the wine cellar.

   Note

   Rack simply adds -ing, since a word ending in ck doubles nothing. The form spreads across several trades: racking bottles in a cellar, racking the balls on a pool table, racking a shotgun's slide to chamber the next round, and the older picture of torment, in which coughing keeps racking a body. The object usually shows which one is meant.

2. 2
   adjective

   Alternative spelling of wracking.

   Days of racking cramps left him too weak to stand.

   Waiting for the test results was a racking experience for the whole family.

   Note

   The adjective stands before a noun for whatever torments body or mind: a racking cough, racking cramps, and in Arthur Conan Doyle a racking experience. Racking and wracking both turn up in these phrases with the same meaning. Unlike a bare participle it can be graded, so one ordeal can be more racking than another, and the worst the most racking of all.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of draining or siphoning beer, wine or cider off its dregs, which clears the liquid and so deters further fermentation.

   After a second racking, the cider was clear enough to bottle.

   Careful racking leaves the spent yeast behind in the old fermenter.

   Similardecanting

   Note

   A cellar job done with a siphon or a tap: the clear liquid moves into a clean vessel, and the spent yeast and sediment, the lees, stay behind. Because brewers and winemakers may rack more than once before bottling, the word counts the rounds as well as naming the process, so a cider can have a first racking and a second.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A method of laying asphalt shingles in which the courses are applied vertically, straight up the roof, rather than across it and then up.

   The crew switched to racking on the tall, narrow section above the porch.

   The shingle maker's installation guide advises against racking on this product line.

   Note

   In roofing a course is one horizontal row of shingles, and racking changes the order in which those rows are built. The roofer carries them up in narrow columns, each taken from the eave toward the ridge before the next is begun, instead of laying full rows across the roof and moving up. The word names a method, so a crew uses racking or avoids it.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   Spun yarn used for racking ropes on board a ship.

   The bosun cut a length of racking and seized the two lines together.

   We ran short of racking halfway through rigging the new tackle.

   Note

   Aboard ship, to rack two ropes is to bind them side by side with crossing turns of small cord so that they cannot slip apart, and racking is the spun yarn kept for that job. Like other cordage it is measured out rather than counted, as in a length of racking or running short of racking.

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