spanning

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of span.

   The cables spanning the gorge carried the weight of the entire walkway.

   Spanning three time zones, the empire proved nearly impossible to govern.

   Note

   The -ing form does much of its work after a noun, as a compact relative clause: cables spanning the gorge, a career spanning four decades. It carries every reach of span, from distance and time to the mathematician's vectors spanning a space, and even the old horse senses of hobbling or being matched as a pair. As a gerund it takes a direct object (spanning the gap), while the countable noun takes of instead.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act or process of reaching across and covering the full width of something.

   Like laying a single bridge that joins two riverbanks into one continuous path.

   The spanning of such a wide estuary demanded entirely new construction methods.

   Engineers debated the best technique for the spanning of the deep ravine.

   Similarbridging, crossing

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this noun can be counted, and spannings is its plural. Peter Evans's The music of Benjamin Britten (1996) uses that plural figuratively, writing of "spannings of musical space", so that a musical range is crossed the way an engineer crosses a ravine. The word therefore names both a single feat of construction and repeated acts of reaching across, literal or imagined.

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