tapping

Pluraltappings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A light blow or knock made against a surface or object.

   The steady tapping of his pen annoyed everyone in the meeting.

   She heard a faint tapping at the front door late that evening.

   Similarknocking, rapping, drumming, tap

   Note

   Usually a sound before it is an action: "a soft tapping at the door," Bram Stoker writes in Dracula (1897), and the mass noun names a run of light knocks heard as one continuous noise. It also counts. Alastair Macaulay, writing on flamenco in 2009, describes "woodpecker tappings" in the footwork, each burst a distinct unit. Use the singular for an ongoing sound and the plural for separate episodes.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of tap.

   Rain was tapping against the windowpane all through the night.

   The woodpecker is tapping at the bark, searching for insects.

   Note

   The participle carries every meaning of tap, not just the knocking one. It works after a form of be (was tapping) and as a gerund in noun positions. Besides light blows, it covers drawing off liquid (tapping a cask), exploiting a source (tapping into reserves), and the informal sense of cadging (tapping a friend for money). The gerund shades into the noun for exploiting a resource, which shares its spelling.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of drawing on or exploiting a resource so it can be put to use.

   The tapping of underground aquifers has steadily lowered the water table.

   Rival tappings of the same natural gas field drained it in less than a decade.

   Similarexploitation, extraction

   Note

   The image of drawing liquid from a source stays close to the surface here. Paul Burke Jacobs and Harry Paul Newton, in Motor Fuels from Farm Products (1938), warn that "competitive tappings of a common oil pool" lead to waste unless rigidly regulated. In the plural it counts separate operations on one shared source. In the singular it names the exploitation as a whole.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A guitar technique in which the strings are struck against the fingerboard with the fingers to sound notes.

   The guitarist's tapping filled the arena during the closing solo.

   Two-handed tapping lets players reach notes a single hand cannot cover.

   Note

   A guitarist's technique of impact rather than plucking: the fingers of either hand strike the strings sharply against the fingerboard, and each blow sounds a note on its own. That is what makes very rapid legato passages and wide leaps between notes possible. Players speak of it as a skill or style, as in his tapping, and as a countable passage, as in a run of tappings.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A connection to an electrical component at a point between its end terminals, as partway along a transformer coil.

   The engineer soldered a tapping midway along the coil to draw off a reduced voltage.

   Each tapping on the winding corresponds to a different output voltage.

   Similartap

   Note

   Transformer windings are where this word earns its keep. A tapping sits partway along a coil rather than at its end terminals, so it reaches only a fraction of the total turns, and therefore a fraction of the voltage. Modern Railways, in June 1962, describes a locomotive design in which two adjacent transformer tappings feed the load at once. The noun is countable: a winding carries several tappings, one for each output.

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