sawing

Pluralsawings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of saw.

   The carpenter is sawing through a thick oak plank.

   Sawing the board in half took longer than anyone expected.

   Note

   The -ing form belongs only to the cutting verb. The other saw, the past tense of see, has no participle of its own, so sawing never means seeing. It works transitively (sawing a plank in half) and intransitively for any back-and-forth motion like a saw's, as in sawing at the air with one hand. As a gerund it names the work itself: the sawing took all morning.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act by which a piece of material is cut through with a saw.

   The repeated sawing left a small mound of dust beneath the workbench.

   One clean sawing split the beam into two even halves.

   Similarcutting

   Note

   In the timber trade the act becomes countable, with each cutting operation counted as one sawing. Finnish Paper and Timber (1966) reports findings from "practical test sawings" checked against geometric calculations. That plural can collide with the word for sawn fragments, which is also usually plural. Context tells them apart: sawings that are made, run or tested are acts, and sawings that are swept up or weighed are material.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A shaving or fragment produced when material is cut with a saw.

   Fine sawings drifted down as the blade bit into the plank.

   He brushed stray sawings from his sleeve before standing up.

   Similarshaving, chip

   Note

   A word that normally travels in the plural, the way shavings and filings do. A single sawing is possible but unusual. The material need not be wood. In 1892 The Journal of Analytical and Applied Chemistry describes a sample of sawings of the usual size being cast into a button or small bar of about 2,000 grains, so these sawings were metal.

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