researching

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of research.

   The team is researching the effects of the new drug.

   Historians are researching documents recovered from the wartime archive.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. As a participle it builds the progressive tenses (is researching the drug); as a gerund it names the activity yet still takes an object (researching the archive took years). The verb works both ways: transitively, researching a question, and intransitively, researching into it. Where the -ing form takes a plural or an adjective, it has crossed into the noun for the activity.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The activity of doing research, especially systematic investigation of a subject.

   Careful researching lies behind every reliable scientific claim.

   She devoted months of patient researching to the biography.

   Similarinvestigation, study, inquiry

   Note

   A noun that can be counted: the plural researchings names separate inquiries rather than the activity in general. Richard Beadle's The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (1994) writes of "the formal researchings into the past by Herod's doctors/councillors". There, into introduces what is being investigated, the same preposition the verb takes when it is used without a direct object.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2