overcoding

overcoding is the present participle and gerund of overcode.

Noun

overcoding (countable and uncountable, plural overcodings)

The use of established codes to take on new meanings, often thereby obscuring distinctions.
- The reason lies in the peculiar efficacy of the state in utilizing overcoding and rendering its principles and categories society-wide.1994, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, →ISBN, page 107
- Stylistic and ideological conventions are examples of such rules used in overcoding.1995, Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, →ISBN, page 212
An instance of overcoding.
- Identification of the semantic status of overcodings is a necessary preliminary to translation because it serves to identify those inferences which it will be necessary to supply in the shape of informal translation (in this case, in the shape of supplementation of the formal translation).1987, Occasional Papers in Translation and Textlinguistics: OPTAT.
- Representation is established through successive overcodings, and the meaning of a phenomenon is given by the dominant overcoding, through a process of one code (or signifier) replacing another.1996, Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, →ISBN

overcode (third-person singular simple present overcodes, present participle overcoding, simple past and past participle overcoded)

To use as an overcode for.
- Social interaction would be the place to study how people learn these cultural codes or reasoning structures, which is related to the human ability to overcode meaning in ways that become conventional (Eco 1976).1984, Semiotica - Volumes 50-51, page 367
To act as an overcode for.
- In one example, she describes an advertisement depictin a nude female torso in profile. Wegenstein suggests that in this particular advertisement, the breasts overcode the body in a way that the face previously had reign.2007, M. Fenske, Tattoos in American Visual Culture, →ISBN, page 105
To use a particular code or set of codes too much.
- One of the greatest sources of unreliability is the constant error introduced by the observer because of distortion of his perceptions created by his own needs or values. An observer who sharply disapproves of certain leadership practices, for example, will have difficulty in preventing a bias. He...1951, Research Methods in Social Relations: Selected techniques, page 530
To code too many things or include too many codes in a coding system.
- Coding should be done with great exactness: it is better to "overcode" than to "undercode."1972, Alice Schlegel, Male dominance and female autonomy

plural	overcodings

What does overcoding mean?: Overcoding means the use of established codes to take on new meanings, often thereby obscuring distinctions.
What is overcoding the present participle and gerund of?: Overcoding is the present participle and gerund of overcode.
What part of speech is overcoding?: Overcoding is a noun.
What is the plural of overcoding?: The plural of overcoding is overcodings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: overcoding (page history and authors); overcode (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

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