Word.ws English Dictionary

pithing

pithing is the present participle and gerund of pith.

Meaning of pith

Verb

pith (third-person singular simple present piths, present participle pithing, simple past and past participle pithed)

  1. (transitive) To render insensate or kill (an animal, especially cattle or a laboratory animal) by cutting, piercing, or otherwise destroying the spinal cord.
  2. (transitive) To extract the pith from (something or (figurative) someone).
    • And yet, instead of exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer."1901–1903, [George] Bernard Shaw, “To Arthur Bingham Walkley”, in Man and Superman. […], Westminster [London]: Archibald Constable & Co., published 1903, →OCLC, page xxxiv

See all 17 meanings of pith

Questions about pithing

What is pithing the present participle and gerund of?
Pithing is the present participle and gerund of pith.

Words near pithing in the dictionary

  1. pithier
  2. pithiest
  3. pithily
  4. pithiness
  5. pithinesses
  6. pithing
  7. Pithion
  8. pithivier
  9. pithiviers
  10. pithless
  11. pithlessly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pithing (page history and authors); pith (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: “pithing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pithing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.