▪ I. homing, vbl. n.
(ˈhəʊmɪŋ)
[f. home v.]
† 1. Naut. (with in) The curving inwards of the sides of a vessel above its extreme breadth; ‘falling’ or ‘tumbling home’. Obs.
| 1622 R. Hawkins Voy. S. Sea (1847) 220 This race building, first came in by overmuch homing in of our shippes. |
2. The action of going home; return home; the faculty possessed by animals (e.g. pigeons, turtles, etc.) of returning home from a distance. Freq. attrib.
| 1765 Treat. Dom. Pigeons 88 When they come to be trained for the homing part. 1875 Live Stock Jrnl. 16 Apr. 35/2, I have always admired the homing faculty in the pigeon. 1886 E. S. Starr in Century Mag. XXXII. 375 The much discussed question of the homing of the pigeon, or, as the French term it, orientation. 1894 A. Morrison Mean Streets 249 At his regular homing-time he appeared. 1901 Camb. Nat. Hist. VIII. ix. 387 The same homing instinct has been observed in some females of the Green Turtle. 1907 G. B. Shaw John Bull's Other Island i. 16 Broadbent: Here you are, belonging to a nation with the..most inveterate homing instinct in the world! and you pretend youd rather go anywhere than back to Ireland. 1922 Flattely & Walton Biol. Sea-Shore viii. 178 There is evidence of a ‘homing sense’ in the common limpet and its relatives. 1939 Copeia iii. 127 Most grown turtles (89·5 per cent) showed some homing instinct or tendency to return to territory from which they were moved. 1956 W. H. Thorpe Learning & Instinct in Animals xvi. 412 Experiments on the homing of dogs. Ibid., The homing performances of bats. 1967 Gardiner & Flemister Princ. Gen. Biol. (ed. 2) xiv. 248 Insects respond to polarized light, and..this capacity is used in orientation and homing behavior. |
3. (In sense of home v. 5); also attrib., esp. in homing device, an automatic device for guiding aircraft, missiles, etc.
| 1923 Jrnl. Inst. Electr. Engin. 803/2 As this method seriously affects the compass and takes a machine off its course, wing coils are only used for ‘homing’, i.e. flying along a radius towards a transmitting station, thus enabling the aircraft to return to its base. 1933 Bureau of Standards Jrnl. Res. XI. 740 In these tests the direction finder was used as a homing device. 1940 Illustr. London News CXCVII. 567 (caption) Direction-finding radio compass for work in connection with loop aerial and ‘homing’ beam. 1947 Crowther & Whiddington Science at War iv. 178 Another..success was gained against the acoustic homing torpedo. 1951 Gloss. Aeronaut. Terms (B.S.I.) iii. 27 Homing aids, systems designed to guide an aircraft to an aerodrome or carrier. 1955 Times 28 June 8/6 There are..other means of detecting a camouflaged operations centre, such as high altitude vertical photography and ‘homing’ on to radio transmissions. 1957 Oxford Mail 20 Aug. 1/4 After launching, the weapon is guided to the target by a special homing head which picks up the ground radar beams reflected back from the enemy. 1962 Gloss. Aeronaut. Terms (B.S.I.) vi. 4 Homing guidance, a system wherein devices built into a missile enable it to detect and steer itself towards, or to intercept, a target. |
▪ II. homing, ppl. a.
[f. home v. + -ing2.]
That goes home; spec. applied to pigeons that are trained to fly home from a distance.
| 1862 Huxley Lect. Wrkg. Men 105 The so called ‘homing’ birds having enormous flying powers. 1886 Daily Tel. 7 Sept., Nowadays, the ‘homing pigeon’..is so much better understood than of yore..that no other agency than electricity would be capable of outstripping him. |