storing

Pluralstorings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of store.

   The museum is storing the paintings in a climate-controlled vault.

   Storing grain through the winter required dry, sealed containers.

   Note

   One spelling, two grammatical jobs. After a form of be it builds the progressive (she is storing the files). Without be it behaves like a noun, heading a phrase that works as subject or object (storing them safely matters). It carries all of the verb's meanings, from keeping goods in a warehouse to the computing sense of writing data into memory, and it nearly always takes a direct object.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A quantity of something that has been kept or built up for future use.

   A modest storing of fuel got the village through the blackout.

   Each autumn the storings of hay in the loft grew until they nearly touched the rafters.

   Similarstock, stockpile, supply, reserve, hoard

   Note

   Here the word turns countable and takes a plural, storings. It names the heap that has been put by, not the act of putting it there. John Marius Wilson's The Rural Cyclopedia (1847) uses it of the farm: the storings of unthrashed corn piled in a barn's bays, which were called the mows. When you mean the act itself, the verbal -ing form does that work.

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