workings

Here the plural stands alone. There is no singular, so the verb is plural too: the workings of the clock are delicate. It usually takes of plus the system in question, and it reaches easily from gears to institutions. The Economist in 2013 wrote of improving the workings of the businesses that private-equity firms take over. It is often sharpened to inner workings.

Several meanings of the singular noun carry over into the plural. Operation or action is normally plural already, and the subsidiary calculations behind a final answer are counted as workings, the neat figures down the side of a page. Two plurals have hardened into words of their own, the inner mechanism and the dug-out parts of a mine, and neither takes a singular.

The word usually travels with a qualifier that says what was dug or what state it is in: coal workings, abandoned workings, the lower workings. Like the mechanism sense, it has no singular. What lies underground can shape what is built above it. RAIL reported in 2022 that the East Coast Main Line was diverted in 1983 to avoid new coal workings.