voiding

Pluralvoidings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of void.

   Voiding the contract now would leave both companies without protection.

   A cat that keeps voiding outside the litter box may have a urinary problem.

   Note

   Its living meanings sit far apart, and the object sorts them out: voiding a contract or a warranty cancels its force, while voiding the bladder or bowels empties them. Older English also used the verb for leaving a place or withdrawing from it, meanings now obsolete, so a voiding in an old text may simply be a departure.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An act of emptying out, discharging, or canceling something, such as urination.

   Patients kept a diary noting the time and volume of every voiding.

   The court's voiding of the marriage left the question of the property unsettled.

   Similarannulment, cancellation, urination, discharge

   Note

   The act noun keeps both halves of the verb: it counts single bodily acts, as in a patient's diary of every voiding, and it names a cancellation, as in the voiding of a marriage. Joseph Hall pairs it with its legal twin in the seventeenth century, writing of "the annulling or voiding of marriages, made unlawfully." Counted, it takes the plural voidings.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   Something that has been emptied out, thrown out, or discharged; also, a leftover piece or fragment.

   Oh! bestow Some poor Remain, the voiding of thy Table, A Morsel to support my famish'd soul

   1714, Nicholas Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore

   Note

   What gets cleared away, rather than the clearing: leftovers, discharges, fragments. Nicholas Rowe's The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) sets it at the table, in a famished plea for "Some poor Remain, the voiding of thy Table," a morsel to live on. In everyday English now, scraps or leavings would carry that meaning.

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