Word.ws English Dictionary

hoardings

hoardings is the plural of hoarding.

Meaning of hoarding

Noun (1)

hoarding (plural hoardings)

  1. (historical) A roofed wooden shield placed over the battlements of a castle and projecting from them.
  2. (Australia, Canada, Hong-Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, UK) A temporary fence-like structure built around building work to add security and prevent accidents to the public.
    • Making inquiries she came to a hoarding, within which were excavations denoting the foundations of a building; and on the boards without one or two large posters announcing that the foundation-stone of the chapel about to be erected would be laid that afternoon at three o’clock by a London preacher...1894 December – 1895 November, Thomas Hardy, chapter VIII, in Jude the Obscure, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1896, →OCLC
  3. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK) A billboard.
    • Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born.1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001

Noun (2)

hoarding (countable and uncountable, plural hoardings)

  1. The practice of accumulating goods.
    • But that doesn’t solve harder questions about the hoarding of vaccines, raw materials and patent rights in the west, or the fact that Covax clearly isn’t working as fast as it should.2021 April 26, Gaby Hinsliff, “Vaccine hoarding is all the more disturbing as a Covid disaster unfolds in India”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  2. (countable) A good which is hoarded.
  3. An anxiety disorder characterized by a compulsive need to accumulate goods and feelings of anxiety or discomfort about discarding such goods.
    • Hoarding can be distressing and dangerous. But it’s not just a matter of ‘too much stuff’ – it’s a complex condition that requires careful, targeted help[.]2023 July 4, Samira Shackle, “‘You reach a point where you can’t live your life’: what is behind extreme hoarding?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Phrases with hoardings

Questions about hoardings

What is hoardings the plural of?
Hoardings is the plural of hoarding.

Words near hoardings in the dictionary

  1. hoarding
  2. hoarding disorder
  3. hoarding disorders
  4. hoarding out
  5. hoardingly
  6. hoardings
  7. hoards
  8. hoards out
  9. hoardsome
  10. hoardy
  11. Hoare

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hoardings (page history and authors); hoarding (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.

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