wearing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of wear.

   Wearing a seatbelt is required by law in every state.

   The actor was wearing a heavy costume under the stage lights.

   Note

   The verb form behind the progressive and the gerund, carrying every sense of wear. It can be transitive (wearing a seatbelt), intransitive (the cuffs are wearing thin) or mean exhausting (the noise is wearing her down). The adjective shares the spelling, so test with a degree word: in "the work is very wearing" it is the adjective meaning "tiring", and in "she is wearing a coat" it is the verb.

2. 2
   adjective

   Causing tiredness or steadily testing a person's patience.

   Like sandpaper on the nerves: each small annoyance adds up.

   Endless small interruptions make office work strangely wearing.

   She found the wearing demands of caregiving harder than the job itself.

   Similartiring, exhausting, draining, tiresome, fatiguing

   Oppositerestful, refreshing

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Clothing or garments considered as a whole; items put on the body.

   The family's wearing hung on pegs by the cottage door.

   He spent his savings on fine wearing and little else.

   Similarclothing, clothes, attire

   Note

   This sense treats clothes as a single mass, usually after a possessive. Shakespeare's Othello has the line "Give me my nightly wearing and adieu," where my nightly wearing means the clothes put on for the night. It is not counted item by item. The plural wearings belongs instead to the act of wearing.

4. 4
   adjective

   Meant or intended to be put on the body, as clothing is.

   The catalog lists wearing apparel under its own heading.

   Customs officers waved through her personal wearing apparel.

   Note

   An ungraded adjective that appears mostly in one phrase, wearing apparel, an older name for clothes. It cannot be more or less so, which separates it from the "tiring" meaning, where more wearing and most wearing are normal. It goes directly before its noun and classifies the noun. It does not describe a quality.

5. 5
   adjective

   Subject to deterioration through use, and liable to wear out eventually.

   Engineers inspect the wearing components of the machine for fatigue.

   The bridge's wearing surface was resurfaced after years of heavy traffic.

   Note

   An engineer's adjective for the part that takes the wear, not whatever causes it. It sits before nouns like surfaces and components. The 1960 article "The first hundred 25 kV a.c. electric locomotives for B.R." praises one bogie design for its "minimum of metallic wearing surfaces." In the eroding meaning, wearing names the force. Here it names the thing that will eventually wear out.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   The act of putting on or having something on the body.

   The wearing of a uniform helps the team look united.

   Frequent wearing of high heels can strain the feet.

   Note

   Once the act becomes an occasion, the noun turns countable and takes a plural: formal crown-wearings. More often it stays uncountable and is followed by of, as in the wearing of a uniform. Keep it apart from the word for clothes themselves: here wearing is something done, and there it is something put on.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   The mechanical process by which a surface is eroded or ground down.

   The constant wearing of the current rounded the boulders in the gorge.

   Friction caused steady wearing along the edge of the gear.

   Similarerosion, abrasion

8. 8
   adjective

   Causing erosion; tending to grind a surface away.

   The wearing force of the tide gradually undercut the sea wall.

   Blowing sand has a relentless wearing effect on the carvings.

   Similarerosive, abrasive

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