versing

Pluralversings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of verse.

   She was versing the legend for a children's anthology when the war broke out.

   Years of versing herself in the archives made her the obvious choice for the post.

   Note

   One -ing form does two jobs: it is a participle in she was versing the legend and a gerund in versing is slow work. It carries every meaning of the verb, from telling a story in verse to the figurative sense of schooling someone in a subject. One use needs care. Versing a rival, meaning competing against them, is colloquial and proscribed, so formal writing prefers playing or facing. The same spelling also serves as the noun for a poem.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A poem; a rendering of a subject in verse.

   The chronicler seems to have known an earlier versing of the siege, now lost.

   Frost's versings on home and hearth are less comforting than they first appear.

   Similarpoem, versification, rendering

   Note

   A word from literary history and criticism, and one that counts easily: versings is its plural. Of introduces the story retold, as in ancient versings of the fight in The History of Early English Literature (1892). On introduces the theme, as with Frost's versings on domesticity in Ed Ingebretsen's Robert Frost's Star in a stone boat (1994). The plural lets a writer weigh several poems on one subject side by side.

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