wrecking

Pluralwreckings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of wreck.

   Pounding waves are slowly wrecking the old harbor wall.

   Fans blamed the coach for wrecking the team's season with one bad trade.

   Note

   Wreck simply adds -ing. The form covers sudden violence, as in waves wrecking a harbor wall, and slower ruin, as in stress wrecking someone's health, and it is at home with hopes, plans and seasons, which can be wrecked as surely as walls. In Australia, wrecking can also mean taking old vehicles apart to recover their useful parts.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of destroying something or damaging it beyond use.

   The deliberate wrecking of the bus shelter cost the town thousands of dollars.

   After a string of wreckings at the site, the builders hired a night guard.

   Similardestruction, vandalism, sabotage

   Note

   This noun can be counted: it names separate acts of destruction, often deliberate ones. The Edinburgh Review of 1850 sets burnings and wreckings beside Orange riots, at Maghera and elsewhere, as attacks on property rather than accidents. Keep it apart from plundering a stranded ship, which shares the noun but means taking valuables from what the sea has already broken.

3. 3
   nounobsolete

   The practice of taking valuable goods from ships wrecked close to the coast.

   When a ship ran aground on the reef, the whole village turned out for the wrecking.

   The magistrate warned that wrecking would be punished as plain theft.

   Note

   The setting is the coast: when a ship came to grief near land, people from the shore stripped it of cargo and fittings. The use is obsolete and goes with an old sense of the verb, to plunder wrecked ships. In a modern text, wrecking almost always means destroying something instead.

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