Word.ws English Dictionary

ricing

ricing is the present participle and gerund of rice.

Noun

ricing (uncountable)

  1. (soap-making) (Development of) undesirable, hard white granules in soap.
    • Fragrances can mutate; seizure and ricing are more common; and the soap batter traces rapidly.2012, Alicia Grosso, The Everything Soapmaking Book, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN
    • Sometimes accompanied by acceleration, ricing is different in that it creates small individual clumps of soap that look like rice granules.2016, Anne-Marie Faiola, Pure Soapmaking, Storey Publishing, →ISBN, page 14
    Synonyms:
    figging
  2. The act of harvesting wild rice.
    • […] harvest wild rice with their families in other areas of the Great Lakes region. In 1939, the year Minnesota harvesters were required to purchase ricing licenses, a number of women harvested rice at Portage Lake and Perch Lake in central[…]2012 February 16, Brenda J. Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community, Penguin, →ISBN
  3. (slang) The act of customizing the user interface of a computer system.

Meaning of rice

Verb

rice (third-person singular simple present rices, present participle ricing, simple past and past participle riced)

  1. (transitive) To squeeze through a ricer; to mash or make into rice-sized pieces (especially potatoes).
    • Riced Potato. Have a flat dish and the colander hot. With a spoon, rub mashed potato through the colander on to the hot dish.1881, Maria Parloa, Miss Parloa's New Cook Book: A Guide to Marketing and Cooking
  2. (intransitive) To harvest wild rice (Zizania spp.)
    • In northern Minnesota the whites have invented the verb "to rice," and speak of "ricing," i. e., harvesting the crop of wild rice.1894, John Merle Coulter, Botanical Gazette, page 505
  3. (rare) To throw rice at a person (usually at a wedding).
    • So far as I can make out, the idiotic function of “ricing” English brides and bridegrooms is not twenty years old.1886 July 24, “Echoes of the Week”, in The Illustrated London News, volume 89, page 90
  4. (transitive) To customize the user interface of a computer system, e.g. a desktop environment. (derived from rice out)

See all 22 meanings of rice

Synonyms of ricing

Phrases with ricing

Questions about ricing

What does ricing mean?
Ricing means (Development of) undesirable, hard white granules in soap.
What is ricing the present participle and gerund of?
Ricing is the present participle and gerund of rice.
What part of speech is ricing?
Ricing is a noun.

Words near ricing in the dictionary

  1. ricine
  2. ricinelaidate
  3. ricinelaidates
  4. ricinelaidic acid
  5. ricinelaidin
  6. ricing
  7. ricing out
  8. ricinia
  9. ricinic
  10. ricinic acid
  11. ricinine

Source and license

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