smoothing

Pluralsmoothings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act or process by which something is made smooth.

   The smoothing of the road surface left it free of bumps and ridges.

   Each coat of varnish required a light smoothing before the next was applied.

   Similarleveling, flattening

   Note

   The noun is often figurative, easing a path rather than planing a surface. Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), writes of "the kind smoothings and preparings of the way." In the plural it reads as a series of small, gentle acts rather than one process. Paired with another -ing noun, as Dickens pairs it, it suggests care taken in advance so that what follows goes easily.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of smooth.

   The baker is smoothing frosting across the top of the cake.

   Smoothing the plaster carefully prevents cracks from forming later.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. As a participle it follows be (she is smoothing the sheets). As a gerund it names the action but still takes an object (smoothing the plaster prevents cracks). That object is what separates it from the noun for the act, which needs of and can go plural as smoothings. Every meaning of the verb carries over, down to the West Country use for stroking an animal's fur.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The creation of an approximating function that captures the important patterns in a dataset while leaving out noise and fine-scale fluctuations.

   Like hearing a song's melody through background static: keeping the tune and dropping the hiss.

   The analysts applied smoothing to reveal the seasonal pattern hidden in daily sales.

   Heavy smoothing can erase real features along with the noise.

   Note

   Statistics uses the word for a deliberate loss of detail. The fitted function keeps the broad pattern and lets fine-scale wiggles and rapid changes drop out. The real judgment is deciding what counts as noise, since anything quick enough can be smoothed away. Analysts apply smoothing to data, and the verb is used the same way: they smooth the data and report the smoothed values.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The reduction of a diphthong to a single vowel sound, also called monophthongization.

   Smoothing in this dialect collapses the vowel of 'tower' into a single long sound.

   The smoothing of 'layer' to a near-monophthong is typical of casual speech.

   Similarmonophthongization

   Note

   Phonology's short, plain name for what is also called monophthongization. A vowel that glides from one quality to another stops gliding and settles on one. The word works as a mass noun for the process, and the usual construction names both ends: smoothing of one vowel to another. Where the longer term sounds clinical, this one pictures the effect: the movement of the glide is ironed flat.

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