stripping

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of strip.

   Volunteers are stripping the seats out of the old bus for restoration.

   Stripping the floors back to bare wood improved the whole room.

   Note

   A form that does double duty. After be it makes the progressive (they were stripping the walls), and at the head of a clause it works as a verbal noun (stripping the floors took a week). With an object it means removing or divesting: stripping a container of cargo, or stripping a screw's thread by overtightening. With no object it usually means undressing or performing a striptease, so a bare she was stripping is read that way.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The action of removing a covering, an outer layer, or clothing from a surface or body.

   The careful stripping of the antique table preserved its original grain.

   Hours of stripping left the workshop smelling of solvent.

   Similarscraping, peeling, removal

   Oppositecoating, covering

   Note

   The noun reaches well beyond furniture and paint. In Principles of Sociology (1879), Herbert Spencer traces bows and courtesies back to "the original prostrations and strippings of the captive," using the plural for separate acts of divesting someone. Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863) takes it into the farmyard: "Never were cows that required such stripping." As a mass noun it names the work; as strippings it counts the individual acts.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A separation process in which one or more components are removed from a liquid by passing a vapor stream through it.

   Engineers added a stripping stage to remove hydrogen sulfide from the crude feed.

   Steam stripping pulled the light solvents out of the contaminated liquid.

   Similardesorption

   Oppositeabsorption

   Note

   Chemical engineers treat this as mass transfer. Volatile components leave a liquid and pass into a vapor or gas, usually in a packed or tray column where liquid runs down against rising vapor. The process is often named for the vapor that does the work, as in steam stripping. The word also works readily as a modifier: a stripping stage, a stripping column.

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