thinning

Pluralthinnings

1. 1
   adjective

   Growing less thick, dense, or numerous over time.

   She brushed back her thinning bangs and squinted at the screen.

   Pilots reported a thinning layer of cloud as they climbed.

   Similarsparse, dwindling, diminishing

   Oppositethickening

   Note

   This adjective describes change in progress: thinning hair is hair on its way to being thin, not hair that already is. Hair is the classic pairing, but cloud, crowds and forests thin too. It is usually not compared, because a thing is either losing density or it is not, and it normally comes before its noun. After be, the same word reads as the verb in progress.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of becoming or making something less thick, dense, or numerous, or the result of this.

   A gradual thinning of the ozone layer worried scientists for decades.

   The barber noticed a steady thinning at the back of his client's scalp.

   Similardepletion, reduction, decrease, loss, decline

   Oppositethickening, increase

   Note

   The general noun covers anything that loses thickness, density or number: ozone, hair, a crowd, a wall of tissue. It usually takes of (a thinning of the ranks), and on its own it implies no cause. Robert Barnes, in A System of Obstetric Medicine and Surgery (1885), argues that a thinning he describes was not atrophic or pathological but came simply from stretching under the forces of labor.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of thin.

   The paint was too thick, so he kept thinning it with solvent.

   Her hair is thinning noticeably at the temples this year.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs for the verb. After be it is the progressive (the crowd was thinning), and in noun positions it is the gerund (thinning paint takes patience). Because thin works both ways, the participle can take an object, as in thinning the sauce, or stand alone, as hair thins by itself. Before a noun, describing a state rather than an action, it has become the descriptive adjective.

4. 4
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of removing plants or parts of plants so the remaining ones grow better.

   Spring thinning of the orchard improves fruit size later in the season.

   Foresters scheduled a thinning to reduce crowding in the young stand.

   Note

   Growers and foresters use it for deliberate subtraction: taking out some plants, or some fruit or shoots, so the rest get more light, water and nutrients. The Indiana State Board of Agriculture's 1881 report names it beside trimming and pruning, and the three are easy to blur. Pruning shapes a plant, while thinning makes room among plants. It works as a mass noun (more thinning) or for one operation (a thinning).

5. 5
   nounusually plural

   Wood, leaves, or other plant parts removed during thinning.

   Workers gathered the thinning into piles for removal by truck.

   Foresters sold the thinnings to a nearby pulp mill.

   Similartrimmings, clippings

   Note

   Here the word means the harvest rather than the operation itself, and it is usually plural: the thinnings are what comes out of the stand. Trees removed early are small, so thinnings often go to pulp, biomass or fuel rather than sawn timber. Even so, the Wisconsin State Horticultural Society's report of 1878 reckoned that young hickories, ashes and larches could be used as thinnings at a profit.

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