shadowing

Pluralshadowings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A work-experience arrangement in which a student learns about a job by following a skilled worker through a normal work day.

   Like an apprentice who learns a trade by watching a master at work day after day.

   Her week of shadowing in the courthouse made a legal career feel real.

   Local firms partnered with the college to provide shadowing for graduating seniors.

   Note

   In schools and colleges the arrangement takes its name from the student's role. The student spends the day as a shadow to a competent worker, watching the job rather than doing it. The noun usually travels with a place or a length of time attached, as in a week of shadowing or shadowing at a local firm. It is offered as an option within work-experience programs.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The practice of secretly or discreetly following a person to keep them under surveillance.

   Like a shadow that moves wherever a person goes but is never noticed.

   Weeks of patient shadowing exposed the courier's hidden meeting spots.

   The reporter sensed the shadowing and changed her route home.

   Similarsurveillance, tailing

   Note

   Espionage keeps the word close to its picture: the follower stays as near and as unnoticed as a person's own shadow. Concealment is the whole point, and it is what separates this use from the workplace sense, where the follower is invited. As a noun it names the operation itself, so it takes words of duration and skill: weeks of patient shadowing, careful shadowing.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of shadow.

   The intern spent the month shadowing experienced surgeons.

   A tall building was shadowing the courtyard by late afternoon.

   Note

   Participle and gerund share one spelling here. The same word builds progressives (a building was shadowing the courtyard) and verbal nouns (shadowing surgeons taught her more than lectures). Most verb uses take an object. The workplace sense of accompanying a professional can also run without one, as in students spending a week shadowing. The nouns, unlike the gerund, take a plural: shadowings.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The effect produced when an object blocks light or a radio signal, leaving a darkened or weakened area behind it.

   Like the quiet water behind a rock in a stream, where the flow is blocked.

   Engineers blamed the dead zone on shadowing by the mountain ridge.

   Shadowing from the tall cliff kept the cove in shade until noon.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A faint representation of something; a dim outline or adumbration.

   Like seeing the dim shape of a mountain through fog before the full view appears.

   The early draft offered a mere shadowing of the novel's later depth.

   In her memoir we find a faint shadowing of the events to come.

   Similarhint, suggestion, outline

   Note

   An abstract use at home in scholarly prose. Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) finds in savage theology "shadowings, quaint or majestic," of the conception of a Supreme Deity. The usual construction is shadowing of something, often in the plural, for a dim hint of an idea that takes fuller shape elsewhere. Adumbration is its close equivalent.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   A task in which a person repeats speech aloud the instant they hear it, usually through earphones.

   Like an echo that follows a voice almost instantly, repeating what it just heard.

   Many interpreters train with shadowing to sharpen their real-time processing.

   Shadowing forces the brain to listen and speak at almost the same moment.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   A technique of copying ROM contents into RAM to allow shorter access times, with the ROM then disabled while the faster copy answers at the same addresses.

   Like transcribing a fragile reference book into a quick-access notebook you keep on your desk.

   Enabling BIOS shadowing copied the firmware into RAM for faster access.

   Shadowing reduced the latency of every call into the system ROM.

   Note

   Hardware borrows the image of a copy that stands in for its original. The contents of slow ROM are duplicated into faster RAM, and the ROM is then switched off. The copy answers at the very same addresses, so software notices only the speed. In use the word usually names what is copied, as in BIOS shadowing, and it is something a system setting turns on or off.

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