paving, vbl. n.
(ˈpeɪvɪŋ)
[See -ing1.]
a. The action of the vb. pave; concr. the product of this action, a pavement; the material of which a pavement is composed.
| 1426–7 Rec. St. Mary at Hill (E.E.T.S.) 67 Payd for certeyne pavynge & mevynge of pewes in the cherche. 1448 Hen. VI Will in Willis & Clark Cambridge (1886) I. 355 The cloistre to..be sette but .ij. fete lower than the pavyng of the chirch. 1497 Naval Acc. Hen. VII (1896) 230 Makyng of ij overmes & payvyng the Kychyn. 1608 Willet Hexapla Exod. 554 A stone worke, such as they use in pauings. 1807 tr. Three Germans III. 59 The clattering hoofs..were heard upon the paving of the outer courts. 1863 H. Cox Instit. iii. ix. 731 Local Acts for paving, lighting, &c. of boroughs. 1888 H. Logeman Rule of S. Benet p. xxxvi, Dr. Thompson..said that the Rugby boys' slang term for this process was paving—paving smooth (I suppose) the rough road of learning Latin. 1914 ‘I. Hay’ Lighter Side School Life v. 138 He is greatly addicted to a more venial crime known as ‘paving’. The paver prepares his translation in the orthodox manner, but whenever he has occasion to look up a word in a lexicon he scribbles its meaning in the margin of the text, or, more frequently, just over the word itself, to guard against loss of memory on the morrow. 1958 L. Foster in Aspects of Translation 10 The ‘paving’ of books by schoolboys and the old-fashioned classical ‘literal crib’ are rather different cases of translations intended to facilitate comprehension of the original text, not to supplant it. |
b. attrib. and Comb., as paving-beetle, paving-block, paving-brick, paving-flag, paving-hammer, paving-machine, paving-ram, paving-rammer, paving-rate, paving-roller, paving-sand, paving-slab, paving-wood, etc.
| 1497 Naval Acc. Hen. VII (1896) 89 Paving rammers of tymbre. Ibid. 94 Paving rammes of tre. 1538 Elyot, Pauicula, a pauyng bytell. 1703 T. N. City & C. Purchaser 40 Paving-bricks..are by some call'd Paving-Tiles. 1756–7 tr. Keysler's Trav. (1760) III. 314 Paving-sand, upon which, as good a foundation, most of the houses in Amsterdam are built, piles being first driven into it. 1776 G. Semple Building in Water 41 With paving Hammers we chipped off so much more of the Bank. 1825 J. Nicholson Operat. Mechanic 544 Paving-slabs and chimney-pieces are found by superficial measure. 1862 H. Marryat Year in Sweden II. 319 These paving-flags form a staple of Öland commerce. 1869 E. Yates Wrecked in Port vii. 66 Men who pay for the paving-rate. 1911 Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 1 Apr. 7/3 The city will purchase from the Michigan Puget Sound Lumber Company a quantity of wood paving blocks sufficient to complete the pavement on View Street. 1934 Ledger-Dispatch (Norfolk, Va.) 11 June 7/8 There is glass sand, moulding sand, building, paving, grinding and polishing sand. 1968 J. Arnold Shell Bk. Country Crafts xxxi. 332 The Scots pine is planted cultivated and felled..for the primary purpose of providing pit-props and telephone poles, railway sleepers and at one time for paving-blocks. |