retaining

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of retain.

   The new policy aims at retaining skilled staff during the downturn.

   Retaining moisture all summer, the clay soil stayed fertile through the drought.

   Note

   The form does double duty. As a participle it builds progressive tenses (the soil is retaining water); as a gerund it still behaves like a verb and takes a direct object (aiming at retaining skilled staff). Its meanings follow retain itself: holding back, keeping a pupil back a year, containing, and continuing to possess. The noun spelled the same way differs because it takes of before its object and has a plural.

2. 2
   adjective

   Serving to hold back or keep something in place, as a retaining wall holds back earth or water where the ground level drops.

   Engineers inspected the retaining wall after heavy rains loosened the slope above it.

   A concrete retaining structure held the terraced fields firmly in place.

   Note

   An adjective that cannot be graded: a wall is either a retaining wall or it is not, and nothing is ever more retaining than something else. It classifies the noun, much as stone or garden would. That is the quickest way to tell it from the verb form: in a retaining wall the word names a kind of wall, while in retaining moisture it is a verb with its own object.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act by which something or someone is held or kept on; a retention.

   The retaining of legal counsel proved essential to the firm's defense.

   The soil's retaining of water depends largely on how much clay it contains.

   Similarretention, keeping

   Note

   Unlike most -ing nouns, it can be counted, and its plural, retainings, has a history. John Malcolm William Bean's From Lord to Patron (1989) writes of retainings by indenture, the agreements that bound men to a lord's service in late medieval England, some of which were declared void. In everyday prose, the singular with of is the usual shape: the retaining of counsel.

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