repairing

Pluralrepairings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of repair.

   Volunteers are repairing the storm-damaged homes along the coast this week.

   Repairing the engine took longer than the crew had expected.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every sense of the verb, not only mending. Guests repairing to the drawing room are moving, not fixing anything, and someone repairing an injury is making amends for it. As a gerund it takes a direct object (repairing the engine took hours). Once it takes the, an of-phrase or a plural, it has become the noun for a mending.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of mending something or restoring it to working order.

   The repairing of the ancient manuscript required months of patient work.

   Each repairing of the old wall left a faint but visible seam.

   Similarmending, fixing, restoration

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this noun can be counted. James Jones Morgan's Epistolary Correspondence (1800) speaks of "the necessity of the repairings" to a set of gates, using the plural for several mending jobs at once. It sits beside the shorter noun repair, which names both the act and its result. Repairing names only the act, so it keeps attention on the work itself.

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