tunnelling

Verb

tunnel (third-person singular simple present tunnels, present participle (US) tunneling or (UK) tunnelling, simple past and past participle (US) tunneled or (UK) tunnelled)

1. (transitive) To make a tunnel through or under something; to burrow.
   • The 1955 Act gave powers for compulsory acquisition of "easements", or permission to tunnel beneath dwelling houses instead of, as had previously been necessary, following approximately the course of surface roads.1962 October, “London gets its Victoria tube”, in Modern Railways, page 258

   Synonyms:

   undermine

2. (intransitive) To dig a tunnel.
3. To transmit something through a tunnel (wrapper for an insecure or unsupported protocol).
4. (transitive) To insert a catheter into a vein to allow long-term use.
5. To undergo the quantum-mechanical phenomenon where a particle penetrates through a barrier that it classically cannot surmount.

See all 14 meanings of tunnel

Noun

tunneling (countable and uncountable, plural tunnelings)

1. The act of burrowing a tunnel.
2. The practice of exploring tunnel.
3. The quantum mechanical passing of a particle through an energy barrier.
4. A type of fraud where assets and profits are transferred out of firms for the benefit of those who control them.
5. (Microsoft Windows) A feature of the file system that allows files to preserve certain properties, such as creation date, even after being deleted and recreated.