[f. prec. sb.]
1. a. trans. To force or drive one into another (or into something else) after the manner of the sliding tubes of a hand-telescope: usually said in reference to railway carriages in a collision.
1872. Amer. R. R. Jrnl., 20 April, 493. Telescoping … car raised up and sent through the advancing car, after the manner of a closing telescope.
1876. World, V. No. 112. 14. No one has ever yet been killed in a Pullman, in which, says its inventor, you can never be ‘telescoped.’
1879. Times, 11 Oct., 5/6. A Pacific express train … ran into a locomotive, completely telescoping the baggage wagons of the express.
1890. Clark Russell, Ocean Trag., II. xviii. 101. He closed the glass with a ringing of the tubes as he telescoped them.
fig. 1894. Cornh. Mag., March, 289. The stages which occupy the broom for the whole of its lifetime are telescoped, as it were, in the gorse into the first three weeks.
1909. Expositor, July, 57. It would then be just possible that St. John had to this slight extent ‘telescoped’ the two accounts together.
b. intr. To slide, run, or be driven one into another (or into something else); to have its parts made to slide in this manner (see quot. 1882, s.v. telescoping below); to collapse so that its parts fall into one another (quot. 1905).
1877. Knight, Dict. Mech., 2524/2. Two screws…, one working within the other, and both sinking or telescoping within the base.
1877. O. W. Holmes, How not to settle it, 92. They telescoped like cars in railroad smashes.
1881. Metal World, No. 19. 295. The proposals to stop a train by applying the power on the locomotive, which … would cause the carriages to ‘telescope.’
1905. Bond, Gothic Archit., 594. Chichester central tower telescoped within the memory of man.
2. trans. To make into or use as a telescope.
1861. [see telescoped below].
1889. Macm. Mag., April, 419/1. Telescoping my hand, [I] sent a long searching look into the length of the dingy shadow.
Hence Telescoped ppl. a.; Telescoping vbl. sb. and ppl. a.
1861. Thornbury, Turner (1862), II. 170, note. Looking through his telescoped hand.
1883. Standard, 2 Aug., 3/5. [He] had a telescoping rod in his hand.
1890. Nature, 11 Sept., 473/1. The telescoping of the limbs and other organs within the body of an insect larva. Ibid. What may be termed the telescoping of ancestral stages one within another.
1898. Westm. Gaz., 3 June, 3/2. The telescoped carriages and the injured men and women lying about.
