transporting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of transport.

   The company is transporting medical supplies to remote villages.

   Transporting livestock over long distances requires careful planning.

   Note

   One spelling, two jobs. After a form of be it builds the progressive (they are transporting grain). In subject or object position it works as a verbal noun (transporting grain is costly). It carries every sense of the verb, including the figurative one of moving someone to strong emotion, and the historical one of deportation, which also stands alone as the noun for penal transportation.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of sending a convicted criminal to a distant penal colony as a form of punishment.

   The magistrate handed down a sentence of transporting, and the convict was shipped off within the month.

   Transporting to the colonies emptied the overcrowded jails of London.

   Similartransportation, deportation, banishment, exile

   Note

   A separate, older formation, from Middle English transportyng, built from transport and -ing. It turned the verb's penal meaning into a noun in its own right. Unlike the everyday verb form, it names the punishment itself, so it can be counted and pluralized (transportings) and fits phrases like a sentence of transporting. Its close equivalent is the more familiar transportation.

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