vbl. sb. [f. as prec. -ING1.] The action of the vb. FLOOR.
1. The action of flooring or laying down a floor.
1632. Sherwood, A flooring with plankes or boords, planchage.
1703. Moxon, Mech. Exerc., 149. Of Flooring of Rooms.
1866. Law Reports, Com. Pleas, 163. The plaintiff is a civil engineer, and the patentee of certain buckle plates used for bridge flooring.
2. concr. The floor of a room, etc.; also, the materials of which it is made.
1624. Wotton, Archit., in Reliq. Wotton. (1672), 63. Mosaique is kinde of painting in small pebbles, cockles, and shells of sundry colours; and of late dayes likewise with pieces of glasse, figured at pleasure; an ornament, in trueth, of much beauty and long life, but of most use in pavements and floorings.
1697. Dryden, Virg. Georg., IV. 237.
| To pitch the waxen Flooring some contrive; | |
| Some nurse the future Nation of the Hive. |
1754. Lady M. W. Montagu, Lett. to C’tess. Bute, 23 June. The beauty of the great saloon gained my affection: it is forty-two feet in length by twenty-five, proportionably high, opening into a balcony of the same length, with a marble ballustre: the ceiling and flooring are in good repair, but I have been forced to the expense of covering the wall with new stucco.
1861. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxf., iv. (1889), 34. The Captain, Miller, and Blake who had many notions as to the flooring, lines, and keel of a racing boat, were appointed to order and superintend the building.
1875. W. S. Hayward, Love agst. World, i. The polished oak flooring.
b. A natural floor; a stratum.
1697. Dryden, Virg. Georg., I. 269.
| And let the weighty Roller run the round, | |
| To smooth the Surface of th’ unequal Ground; | |
| Lest crack’d with Summer Heats the flooring flies, | |
| Or sinks, and thro’ the Crannies Weeds arise. |
1804. C. B. Brown, trans. Volney’s View U. S., 47. On the road from Cincinnati to Lake Erie, it is found to be the flooring of the Miami and Clay Rivers.
1857. Livingstone, Trav., xxii. 428. Sandstone rock, with pebbles, which forms the flooring of the country.
3. Malting. The operation of spreading the grain on the malt-floor, and treating it there in the required manner.
1839. Ure, Dict. Arts, 93. Malting … the couching, sweating, and flooring.
1885. H. Stopes, Malt, xix. 344. Flooring. This is also called spireing.
4. The action of knocking down or throwing to the ground.
1819. T. Moore, Tom Crib’s Mem., Pref. (ed. 3), p. xii. Cross-buttocking (or what the Greeks called ὑποσχελιζειν) being as indispensable an ingredient, as nobbing, flooring, &c. &c.
5. attrib. and Comb., as flooring-beam, -board, -stone, -timber; flooring-clamp (see quot.).
1847–8. H. Miller, First Impr., v. (1857), 81. Two gloomy walls of rock of vast height, connected half-way up,—as *flooring beams connect the walls of a skeleton building,—by a range of what seems rafters of rock.
1881. F. Young, Every man his own Mechanic, § 173. *Flooring boards 10s. per square.
1874. Knight, Dict. Mech., I. 889/1. *Flooring-clamp. An implement for closing up the joints of flooring-boards.
1671. J. Webster, Metallogr., vii. 117. Orichalcum or Brass, which is found in the Quarries of Stone, Slate-pits, or where they get *flooring-stones for paving of houses.
