righting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of right.

   Volunteers spent the morning righting the toppled gravestones.

   Righting the company's finances will take years of effort.

   Note

   One spelling carries every use of the verb right, so context decides between correcting a mistake, setting a fallen thing upright, and restoring someone's rights. Most uses are transitive and take an object (righting a wrong, righting the boat). The intransitive use needs none, as when a capsized craft is slowly righting. As a gerund it shades into the noun of correction, which can also be pluralized as rightings.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of correcting something or restoring it to a proper state.

   The righting of the historical record required years of patient research.

   Critics praised the slow but steady righting of the institution's finances.

   Similarcorrection, rectification, restoration, repair

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this noun can be counted, so the plural rightings is natural. It usually takes an of-phrase naming what was set straight. Its most telling partner is wrong, as in the rightings of social wrongs. The pairing of right and wrong gives the phrase its moral weight, and it suits writing about justice and reform better than everyday repairs.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The return of a vehicle to an upright position from a tilted or overturned one.

   The lifeboat's automatic righting let it recover within seconds of capsizing.

   Designers tested the kayak's righting after deliberately rolling it underwater.

   Similarrecovery

   Oppositecapsizing

   Note

   Where the corrective noun is about fixing what is wrong, this one is purely physical: a car, a lifeboat or a kayak coming back upright. It reflects two uses of the verb, setting something upright and returning upright, so it can name either a crew's work on an overturned car or a craft's own recovery after capsizing.

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