shelling

Pluralshellings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A sustained attack on a target using artillery fire.

   Heavy shelling forced the defenders to abandon the forward trenches.

   After hours of shelling, the bridge had collapsed into the river.

   Similarbombardment, barrage, cannonade, pounding

   Note

   War reporting mostly treats this as a mass noun: heavy shelling, constant shelling, hours of shelling. It can also be counted when separate episodes are meant, and the plural shellings then marks a series of distinct bombardments rather than one long one. Context keeps it apart from shelling peas or nuts, since a front-line report and a recipe rarely share a sentence.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of removing the outer shell or pod from nuts, peas, and similar foods.

   The shelling of fresh beans is far easier when the pods are still soft.

   Volunteers shared the shelling of chestnuts before the festival meal.

   Similarshucking, husking

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of shell.

   Artillery units were shelling the ridge before the infantry advanced.

   She spent the morning shelling beans on the porch.

   Note

   One spelling carries the verb into very different jobs. Shelling peas and shelling a ridge both take an object, while beans can be shelling from the pod, or a crust shelling off, with no object at all. Add out and the money sense appears, as in shelling out for repairs, which is informal. As a gerund it shades into the nouns: the work of hulling and an artillery bombardment.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The grain remaining once its husks have been taken off.

   The mill sold sacks of shelling to bakers in the surrounding towns.

   A handful of shelling went into the pot to thicken the broth.

   Similargroats

5. 5
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A pattern of shallow, irregular cracks in the surface of a coating such as plaster or mortar.

   Like the fine crackle pattern on old ceramic glaze.

   Inspectors noted shelling across the ceiling plaster once the leak had dried.

   The mortar developed shelling within months of the repair.

   Similarcrazing, cracking

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   An ordering of the facets of a boundary complex in which each facet after the first meets the union of the earlier facets in a ball or a sphere.

   Like adding tiles to a mosaic so each new tile shares an edge with the growing picture.

   The polytope admits a shelling, so its boundary complex behaves predictably.

   Topologists proved that every convex polytope has a shelling of its facets.

   Note

   A topologist's recipe for building a complex one facet at a time. Each new facet has to join what is already there along a ball or a sphere and never along anything more tangled, so the construction stays well behaved at every step. The usual verb is admits: a complex admits a shelling or it does not, and the same complex may admit several.

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