docking

docking is the present participle and gerund of dock.

Noun

docking (countable and uncountable, plural dockings)

The process of cutting off or trimming the tail or ears of an animal.
The securing of a vessel to the quayside with cables.
The process of connecting one spacecraft to another.
(slang) A sex act where two partners are co-joined by their penises, with overlapping foreskins.
- From their discussions, the participants mentioned informational and stimulating variations. For touching, one could always use feather dusters, a massage, a tongue in the ear, spooning and sucking toes (known in New York City as "shrimping). There's also "docking" for foreskinned men who can...1986 December 14, E. G. Martin, “Hot & Healthy: A Second Coming Out”, in Gay Community News, volume 14, number 22, page 7
(molecular biology) A method which predicts the preferred orientation of one molecule to a second when bound to each other to form a stable complex.
The pricking of many small holes into doughs and pastry.

dock (third-person singular simple present docks, present participle docking, simple past and past participle docked)

(transitive) To clip or cut off a section of an animal's tail; to practise a caudectomy.
- The Celebrity, by arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at Mohair on a certain afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the track.[…]Their example was followed by others at a time when the master of Mohair was superintending in person the docking of some...1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, pages 58–59
(transitive) To reduce (wages); to deduct from (someone).
- Her wages were docked by ten dollars.
(informal, transitive) To reduce the wages of (a person).
- They docked me ten dollars for breaking the vase.
(transitive) To cut off, bar, or destroy.
- to dock an entail
(transitive) To pierce holes, as pricking dough with a fork, to prevent excessive rising in the oven.
- Pricking holes in the rolled-out pie dough allows the steam to escape while it's baking. Without this, the steam would puff up in bubbles and pockets throughout the crust, which would make some parts of the crust cook too quickly and also result in an uneven surface for your filling. Docking is...Emma Christensen (11 July 2008), “How and When to Dock a Pie Crust”, in The Kitchn

dock (third-person singular simple present docks, present participle docking, simple past and past participle docked)

(intransitive) To land at a harbour.
- On 28 February, for example, a US Navy ship docked in Nampo, the port for Pyongyang, with equipment for joint searches for remains of US soldiers missing from the 1950-1953 Korean War. China may look askance at the US and North Korean militaries working together like this.29 February 2012, Aidan Foster-Carter, BBC News North Korea: The denuclearisation dance resumeshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17213948

Docking (countable and uncountable, plural Dockings)

From dock + -ing.

From Middle English dockyng. By surface analysis, dock + -ing.

From Old English docce (“dock, a weedy plant”) + -ing.

What does docking mean?: Docking means the process of cutting off or trimming the tail or ears of an animal.
What is docking the present participle and gerund of?: Docking is the present participle and gerund of dock.
What part of speech is docking?: Docking can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of docking?: The plural of docking is dockings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: docking (page history and authors); Docking (page history and authors); dock (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “docking.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/docking. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.