remembering

Pluralrememberings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of remember.

   He kept remembering the song long after the concert ended.

   Remembering to lock the door, she hurried back upstairs.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. As a participle it builds progressives and loose clauses (was remembering; remembering the time, she smiled). As a gerund it fills a noun's slot (remembering names is hard). It carries every meaning of remember, including the obsolete "remind" one, so in older prose remembering someone can mean reminding them. Once it takes a plural, it has become the noun for an act of recall.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act by which something past is recalled and brought back to mind.

   The remembering of childhood summers filled the entire afternoon.

   Grief is partly a long remembering of what has been lost.

   Similarremembrance, recollection

   Oppositeforgetting

   Note

   A noun that keeps the motion of the verb inside it: a remembering is recall in progress, not a stored memory. A. A. Milne in 1926 sets "just a remembering" against "a real story." It can be countable or uncountable, and the plural belongs to cultural theory. Marita Sturken writes of collective rememberings, and Merrelyn Emery lists rememberings beside imaginings and expectings. Where remembrance or recollection would sound settled, it stresses the process.

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