singling

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of single.

   The new tax was criticized for singling out small family farms.

   Singling out one employee for blame would damage team morale.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every verb sense of single, so it turns up in very different settings: a batter singling to reach first base, a horse singling in the broken gait called singlefoot, crews singling a railway, the use behind the track-reduction noun. In everyday prose it comes most often with out, as in singling out one employee for blame. The bare intransitive 'withdrawing' use is archaic.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The conversion of a railway line from double-track down to a single track.

   The singling of the branch line cut maintenance costs but reduced capacity.

   Local commuters blamed the long delays on the recent singling of their route.

   Similarsingle-tracking, dedoubling

   Oppositedoubling

   Note

   Railway writing uses it with of and a named stretch of line. Trains Illustrated in 1959 reported the planned singling of the line from Selby to Shipton Lane, which was to be worked on the one-engine-in-steam principle. Single-tracking says the same thing more plainly, and dedoubling is another name for it. The verb behind it is single, used transitively: to single a line.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The weak spirit drawn from the first distillation of fermented wash or wort, also known as low wine.

   The stillman collected the singling and returned it to the wash still for a second pass.

   The cloudy singling drawn off the first run was far weaker than the finished whisky.

   Note

   A distiller's word, tied to the first pass through the still. The fermented wash or wort goes in, and what comes over is still too weak to count as finished spirit. Distillers also call it low wine, and the noun takes a plural, singlings. It names a stage rather than a product: the singling goes back into the still before anything is finished.

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