shafting

Pluralshaftings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of shaft.

   Fans felt the league was shafting small-market teams in the new revenue deal.

   The pro shop charges extra for shafting custom drivers.

   Note

   As a participle it follows be and takes an object, either a person being treated unfairly or a thing being fitted with a shaft: the league is shafting small teams, the pro shop is shafting a new driver. Mind the setting, since another of the verb's slang meanings is sexual. Several nouns share the spelling, among them the slang for a raw deal.

2. 2
   nounslangcountable or uncountable

   The act of deceiving someone or treating them in a way that does them harm.

   Small investors took a shafting when the company quietly changed the terms.

   Voters are fed up with the shafting they keep getting from both parties.

   Note

   The noun usually sits after get or take, which puts the speaker on the receiving end: investors took a shafting, voters keep getting the shafting. It is slang, at home in angry conversation rather than formal writing; a complaint letter or a news report would say unfair treatment or being cheated in a neutral voice.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A system of connected shafts that transmits motion, for example from an engine to the machines it drives.

   Overhead shafting, turned by a single steam engine, once powered every loom in the factory.

   The engineers replaced the worn shafting with individual electric motors.

   Note

   Its classic setting is the workshop before every machine had its own electric motor, when one engine could drive everything through long lines of shafting along the ceiling, with belts dropping from pulleys to each machine. Where a shaft is one rod, shafting is the whole connected run, so engineers speak of a length or a run of overhead shafting.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Shafts considered collectively, as a set or a quantity of material.

   Straight shoots of dogwood make good shafting for arrows.

   The supplier stocks steel shafting in a dozen diameters.

   Note

   Here shafts are treated as material, the way timber or tubing is: a supplier stocks shafting by diameter, and an arrow maker gathers it from straight shoots. It can also be counted when batches are meant, as in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society, where stone axes prove unsuitable for gathering shaftings of the proper diameter for arrows.

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