sheeting

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Fabric woven for making bedding sheets.

   She bought several yards of soft sheeting for the new beds.

   Hotels often order plain white sheeting in bulk.

   Note

   Here the -ing of sheet + -ing names a material rather than an action: sheeting is the cloth that sheets are cut from, bought by the yard. It is usually uncountable (a bolt of plain white sheeting), but the plural sheetings is used when different kinds of the fabric are meant. Keep it apart from the forming process, where the same suffix names an action instead.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The flattening of a material such as dough or metal into thin sheets.

   The sheeting of the dough into thin layers takes practice.

   Quality control begins right after the sheeting of the metal.

   Similarrolling, flattening

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of sheet.

   Heavy rain came sheeting across the empty parking lot.

   Crews were sheeting the scaffold to keep dust off the street.

   Note

   The participle carries every sense of the verb, and they take different constructions. Rain sheeting down or across a street is intransitive, with no object. Sheeting a scaffold, meaning covering it, takes an object, and so does sheeting a sail, meaning trimming it. As a gerund the forming sense, as in sheeting metal, shades into the noun for the process.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A protective facing of planks or boards fixed along an embankment.

   Engineers inspected the sheeting protecting the railway embankment.

   Years of flooding had weakened the sheeting along the levee.

   Similarplanking, boarding, revetment

   Note

   An engineer's word for timber that holds earth back. The planks or boards are driven or set against the face of an embankment or excavation, sometimes as interlocking sheet piles, to resist lateral earth pressure and keep the soil from collapsing. In this sense sheeting is a structure, not a fabric. Engineers inspect, drive or replace it as they would a wall.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   In geology, the splitting of rock into sheet-like layers as a form of weathering, caused when compressive stress on the rock is released.

   Geologists attributed the dome's curved layers to sheeting.

   Sheeting near the quarry face produced thin, parallel slabs of stone.

   Similarexfoliation

   Note

   Geologists use the word for rock that splits once the weight above it is gone. As erosion strips away the confining overburden, the relieved rock fractures into curved slabs that run parallel to the exposed surface, and the cracks it leaves are called exfoliation joints. The process explains the layered shells of rock domes and the thin, parallel slabs that peel from a quarry face.

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