sending

Pluralsendings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of send.

   The company is sending engineers to inspect the damaged site.

   Volunteers are sending supplies to the areas hit by the flood.

   UsageKeeps the objects of send: sending someone a message, or sending a message to someone.

   Note

   The same -ing form does two jobs. After a form of be it builds the progressive (they are sending help). In a noun's position it works as a gerund, as in Mark Tran's 2013 Guardian Weekly line about parents who fear sending their children to school. Once it takes "the" and "of" (the sending of troops), it has become the noun for the act.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act by which a person or thing is sent.

   The sending of troops to the border raised tensions across the region.

   A delay in the sending of the report cost the company the contract.

   UsageMost often the sending of + what is sent: the sending of troops, the sending of a report.

   Similardispatch, deployment, delivery, transmission

   Oppositereceipt, recall

   Note

   Unlike the -ing verb form, this noun can be counted: one story may have several sendings. Klyne Snodgrass's Stories with Intent (2008) compares the banquet parable in Matthew and Luke this way, finding three sendings of servants in each gospel, framed differently.

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