zoning

zoning is the present participle and gerund of zone.

Noun

zoning (countable and uncountable, plural zonings)

Legislative action for the purpose of regulating the use of property and the construction of buildings within the area under the jurisdiction of the legislative body concerned.
- These towers are not only the product of advances in construction technology – and a global surfeit of super-rich buyers – but a zoning policy that allows a developer to acquire unused airspace nearby, add it to their own lot, and erect a vast structure without any kind of public review process...2019 June 1, Oliver Wainwright, “Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the ‘pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media...
The use of zones, such as fare zones.
- The system of zoning would lead logically to the introduction of the modern ticket barriers from 1987 (the Underground Ticketing System, or UTS), in that it allowed the software in the ticket gates to be relatively simple.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 244

zone (third-person singular simple present zones, present participle zoning, simple past and past participle zoned)

(transitive) To divide into or assign to sections or areas.
- Please zone off our staging area, a section for each group.
(transitive) To define the property use classification of (an area).
- This area was zoned for industrial use.
(intransitive, slang) To enter a daydream state temporarily, for instance as a result of boredom, fatigue, or intoxication; to doze off.
- I must have zoned while he was giving us the directions.
Synonyms:

zone out
(archaic, poetic, transitive) To girdle or encircle.
To assign to a restricted category.
- We've zoned each other as friends; we'll never be anything more.

plural	zonings

What does zoning mean?: Zoning means legislative action for the purpose of regulating the use of property and the construction of buildings within the area under the jurisdiction of the legislative body concerned.
What is zoning the present participle and gerund of?: Zoning is the present participle and gerund of zone.
What part of speech is zoning?: Zoning is a noun.
What is the plural of zoning?: The plural of zoning is zonings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: zoning (page history and authors); zone (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

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-zoning.oga.

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